German Elite Overclocker Der8auer recently uploaded an interesting video where he reviews the latest and greatest Z270 platform motherboard from ASUS, the Maximus IX Apex. As well as looking at the board, its design and features, he also shows how to set BIOS to get a Core i7 7700K to a nice and stable 5GHz. The Maximus IX Apex is already proving to be a popular Z270 board with Overclockers, and is the second most used board on HWBOT for Kaby Lake submissions, including several World Records. It has a unique x-shaped PCB makes it look cool and will doubtlessly mean plenty of fun with RGB lighting. Of course the real genius is with the board's performance capabilities.

The video is split in two parts. In Part one Roman gives us a quick examination of the Maximus IX Apex board’s VRM design and the heatsink designs for the power delivery portion of the board and the PCH. He takes a moment to outline a new feature that debuts on the Apex board; the DIMM.2 module which allows you to hook up a pair of M.2 drives, vertically mounted on the outer DDR4 slot. This allows you to connect the drives to the chipset’s PCI Express lanes in a RAID configuration.

In terms of memory overclocking, the board does exceptionally well. Roman tested a G.SKILL Trident Z DDR4 kit rated at 4,266MHz and it ran it at the target frequency with very little adjustment beyond the kit’s XMP profile – pretty impressive. Part one concludes with Roman installing the board on his test bed while going through the main features in terms of Overclocking. Part 2 deals largely with configuring the BIOS. This includes how to set up the DIMM.2 drive in RAID mode. Roman then goes through the settings for the memory and the CPU including configuring the AVX instruction offset feature that Kaby Lake now includes. He then goes through all the BIOS settings that are involved with Overclocking the Core i7 7700K to 5GHz.

You can find Part one of the guide from der8auer here on his YouTube channel, as well as Part 2 here.