ASUS ROG Crosshair VIII Formula review - Product Showcase

  

This X570 motherboard will get you eight SATA 6 Gb/s storage ports. Sitting left of the PCIe x16 slots are two M.2 slots, using x4 PCIe 3.0 or 4.0 lanes directly from the CPU and chipset. There are plenty of USB 3.1 gen2, euhm called 3.2 these days, ports available through internal motherboard connectors.

Here we can see the four DIMM slots which offer support for dual-channel DDR4 memory up to an advertised 4800 MHz. You can install a maximum of 1280GB in total with Ryzen 3000, for older generations that are 64 GB. Given the nature of Ryzen 3000 and its interconnect tied to the memory speed, we recommend 3200~3600 memory preferably at low latency (CL14). But please make sure you get at least a 3200 MHz kit. BTW you can also spot a POST diagnostic LED, which will display any error or POST status codes during bootup. 

 
To the lower part under that heatsink where you can see the screws, you can see an 8cm type 2242/2260/2280 slot. Delivering up to 64 Gb/s data transfer speed per connector. So it supports PCIe 4.0 x4.  As such NVMe M.2 SSDs are really fast on this platform as our results will show. Please do keep in mind that to enable PCie 4.0 on an SSD, also requires a PCIe 4.0 compatible SSD. otherwise, you'll revert (backward compatible) to gen PCIe 3.0 (which is still blazingly fast of course).

The Formula comes with a massive backplate, looks great. However once inserted you cannot see it and what exactly does it cover/protect?