ASUS Maximus X Hero and ASUS STRIX Z370E LGA 1151 Motherboard Review – ASUS’s $250 and $200 US Offerings

Test Setup

For testing, we used the latest Intel Core i7-8700K, Core i5-8600K and Core i5-8400 CPUs which were sent to us by Intel. The Intel Coffee Lake family comes with higher core count on the main stream platform but prices are close to the predecessors in the same segment. We also slightly updated our test platform as Intel had sent us with their 32 GB Optane Memory which they say boosts performance of SATA based storage devices significantly and Coffee Lake can prove to be worthy demonstration for this type of memory product.

ASUS ROG Z370 Test Platform:

Processor	Intel Core i7-8700K
Motherboard	ASUS ROG Maximus X Hero ASUS ROG STRIX Z370-E Gaming Gigabyte Z370 AORUS Gaming 7 ASRock Z370 Professional Gaming i7
Power Supply	Corsair RM 750X Gold Plus
Solid State Drive	Samsung SSD 960 EVO M.2 (512 GB)
Hard Disk	Seagate Barracuda 2 TB 7200.12
Memory	G.SKILL Trident Z RGB Series 32 GB (4 x 8GB) CL16 3600 MHz
Case	Corsair Graphite Series 780T Full Tower
Video Cards	MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Lightning X
Cooling Solutions	Corsair H115i GTX Cryorig R1 Ultimate
OS	Windows 10 64-bit

Our test rig includes the Samsung 960 EVO 500 GB SSD that boots up our main OS while a 2 TB Seagate HDD is used for demonstration purposes for the Intel Optane memory. In addition to these, we are running a MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Lightning X graphics card, a Corsair RM 750X Gold Plus power supply and 32 GB of G.Skill provided Trident Z RGB series memory which runs with a clock speed of DDR4-3600 MHz. For cooling, we used the Cryorig R1 Ultimate and Corsair H115i GTX AIO coolers to see how the new Coffee Lake CPUs perform on both air and liquid cooling solutions.

We won't be focusing on Intel's Core i7-7700K architecture in this review since it is entirely the same chip as Skylake along with minor improvements. The Skylake / Kaby Lake architecture analysis can be seen in detail here. For overclocking, I made the following tweaks to the CPUs:

• ASUS ROG Maximus X Hero With Intel Core i7-8700K @ 5.1 GHz With 1.362V (100 x 51)
• ASUS ROG Z370-E Gaming With Intel Core i7-8700K @ 5.0 GHz With 1.312V (100 x 51)

You can find additional information about our hardware review process and ethics policy here.

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