Asus ROG Crosshair VIII Impact

A little board that makes a big impact.

We’re very happy to see the return of the small form factor Impact to Asus’ line up, having been absent from the last couple of generations. Impact boards always seemed like a labour of love for Asus engineers, with their one-off daughter boards and unique implementations. The X570 equipped Crosshair VIII Impact (C8I) looks like it does justice to the Impact legacy.

One obvious area of departure for the C8I is its form factor. Whereas Impact boards have previously been true mini-ITX designs, the Crosshair VIII Impact is instead a mini-DTX board, where the PCB is about 3cm longer at the bottom part of the motherboard. While a mini-DTX board won’t fit in a true ITX case, most of them do allow for a dual slot graphics card so it should be widely compatible.

There are a few notable features. The backplate features an attached heatpipe to help cool the VRM. You’ll also notice a version of Asus’ DIMM.2 m.2 drive storage technology, shrunken down to the SO-DIMM form factor. While you’re not getting memory speeds as some might think, it’s an interesting way to mount the drives, and no doubt represents a significant engineering investment to make it work properly.

You get all the standard features you’d expect on an X570 motherboard, though at this price we’d like to see 2.5G LAN or better. A top quality power delivery system capable of powering the 3950X, along with Wi-Fi 6 and a quality audio implementation are welcome, though they’re standard at this price. Note that the board doesn’t have any video outputs and only three analogue audio jacks if you’re planning to use it with a surround sound speaker set.

One of the areas the Impact excelled in our testing was memory overclocking, in part thanks to its two DIMM design. These days, testing CPU OC is almost pointless on high end motherboards as current generation CPUs run into cooling limitations before the motherboard breaks a sweat. Not all boards are created equal when it comes to memory support though. If you have a good set of B-Die memory, you’ll be very pleased with the abilities of the C8I. Do check out the memory OC profiles in the BIOS.

Summing up a board like this is difficult. There’s no doubt it’s innovative, but we struggle to define exactly what its purpose is. At $729 its pricing is far too high. For most users, the toughest competition for the Impact comes from Asus’ own Strix X570i. It’s an ITX design, costs 40% less and has a mostly similar feature set. We think the Impact is best suited to overclockers, particularly those running very fast memory and high core count CPUs.

We love the way Asus is never afraid to push the envelope and innovate. The C8I is fast, very capable it and loves high speed memory. What it really needs is a hundred or two knocked off the price and we’d be all over it.

“You get all the standard features you’d expect on an X570 motherboard, though at this price we’d like to see 2.5G LAN or better. ”