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ASUS ROG Maximus VI Formula Motherboard Review

Motherboards/Intel S1150 by leeghoofd @ 2013-11-04

ASUS delayed the release of the Maximus VI Formula till after Computex 2013. We got a glimpse of the board at the ASUS booth and it looked at first glance like a TUF/ROG hybrid. The ROG series are renown as high end motherboards, stunning looks and high performance; however not engineered solely for gamers, but the enthusiast and extreme overclockers get their sweets too. Usually the ROG series had 3 members: the mATX Gene, the midrange Formula and the flagship, the Extreme board. With the Z87 series, ASUS throws an entry level priced ROG in the mix with the Maximus VI Hero board and even a mITX board, the Impact. The Hero is comparable as being the vanilla board of the Republic of Gamers line up. The small mATX Gene VI gives those with small cases the option to install a top class motherboard; the Formula for those that seek a full ATX board packed with features, yet still at an affordable price level. The flagship Extreme board is the most expensive and targeted at those that want either the best of the best or the ultimate board that can push the envelope, no matter the cooling method used.

OCed 2D Results

Time to give these boards a run for their money on air. Instead of bumping up the CPU multiplier to 45X, we set the Rams at 2800MHz C11-13-13-31 2T and tighten the secondary and tertiary timings to put some extra stress on the IMC too.

i7-4770K@4500MHz
CORSAIR 2800C11-13-13-31 2T (tweaked from SPD C11-14-14-31)

Why only 4500MHz ? Well our retail CPU is not comparable with all the Intel ES CPUs we see popping up on most websites. Fooling people 5GHz daily can be done at 1.3Vcore... Great for who have these samples, but you the readers will be so utterly disappointed if your brand new CPU can't even reach 4600MHz stable at 1.3Vcore. Maybe with one out of 100 retails you can manage the same speeds as the ES versions. Our i7-4770K retail is very average in voltage (1.2Vcore), however just gets too hot at anything over 4600MHz.

SuperPI 32M shows the performance and efficiency of the ASUS board as it grabs the lead over the rest. The differences aren't big between the top 2, the XPower still lacks efficiency at high frequencies. We included the results of the latest XPOWER beta bios. The latert TCH bios is not included, as it hardly shows any improvement in compatibility for my hardware.

The AIDA Bandwidth results again show the Formula board just outperforming the rest, again the difference is not huge.

And the story continues, the ASUS boards are renown for there well dialed in BIOSes. This however does not imply that they are always very user friendly, as sometimes one wrong settting can be the difference between efficient or not. The abundancy of settings is overwhelming and in this case more isn't always better. At a certain moment too much is too much...

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