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learn more welcome to my unboxing of the Maximus 6 formula from ASUS this is
probably out of all the Z87 boards the
one that I can really look at and go yes there is a very compelling value here
for this high-end board because it includes things that I personally
believe in very strongly and that is a nice high-end Intel Nix solution with
prioritization with that said that's included on a lot of the other ASUS
boards but where it really gets real for me so to speak on their formula grade
boards is the onboard audio solution so
here they have a bunch of stuff that may or may not mean anything to you so Ela
premium audio capacitors audio capacitors are not necessarily the same
as regular capacitors you can have a great capacitor that's not not
necessarily fantastic for audio applications all right so they've also
got what else what else do they have to say about themselves here Supreme effect shielding Emi Protection cover okay
differential design with premium opamps premium op amps is definitely important
here wima film capacitors WEA rather
sorry cus logic CS 4398 DAC and they
also have a TPA 612 A2 600 ohm high-fi
headphone amp so ASUS's whole thing with their onboard audio Solutions is that
it's more than the sum of the parts now they do list out all the parts for you
spec heads that really want to know what's in there but what they're trying
to do and they're using a lot of the experience that they get from their Zonar cards is they're trying to deliver
a balanced configuration right out of the box now there are competitors that
are offering features such as swappable opamps on their onboard Solutions but it
should be noted that per a thread on the audio section of the Linus Tech tips
Forum swappable opamps isn't necessarily a good thing you shouldn't NE
necessarily even want to swap out your op amps because the rest of the system
was designed around the one that it was designed to run with and it's kind of
like you could put you know a th000
horsepower engine in a Volkswagen Beetle but you probably shouldn't because it
will likely tear the axles off if you actually tried to go anywhere in it um
so it's it's it's that kind of thing and it's less extreme than that but I think
you guys get my point in terms of accessories we've got a full kit not
quite as Extreme as the Maximus 6 Extreme which makes a lot of sense
there's a manual with some useless discs inside although you got a sweet looking
Rog sticker in there so don't throw that away while you're throwing away the disc
an SLI Bridge with their awesome Republic of Gamers branding flexible
black perfect SLI Bridge good job ASUS Q connectors a door hanger enter Champion
to break and do not disturb champion in
action I think they got a bit of a champion to break I think they meant on
break but whatever uh we've got an antenna for the builtin wireless AC as
well as their combo card that I personally really like so it includes
both Wireless and an ngff slot so that
you can install a uh mini SSD that'll
that'll actually interface with PCI Express rather than with a SATA
interface like you would on MSA because on a desktop let's face it what is the
point of installing an NSA SSD it doesn't perform any better it's just you
have lots of room uh all right next up we've got the io Shield as well as eight
serial ata3 cables four of which are right angle four of which are straight
and those little handy Rog labels for your SATA CA so you don't lose track of
what's going where and why and how as you guys may or may not have noticed
this is one sexy motherboard both b-roll
and I are in agreement that out of everything we've looked at so far this
is got to be the best looking motherboard we've encountered they've even done a few things that I think are
just just exceptional so so I want to point those out right off the bat so
number one is their Rog armor so there
is a top plate as well as a back plate
now the back plate is actually the one I'm a little bit more interested in
because it is metal and it has some
definite functionality so number one is it increases the rigidity of the board
overall so if you were to over torque any screws such as on when you're
installing your CPU heat sink the board is less likely to Bow and flex and the
other thing about it is that the name armor is appropriate because it is not
that uncommon for people to accidentally install an extra um you know standoff in
the back of their motherboard tray or anything like that that can actually
ruin your board and cut traces on the back of your board if you don't realize
it in time this will actually prevent that from happening in most cases
because it will just hit the armor so there you go that's really cool on the
front it's a plastic shroud and uh ASUS themselves uh admitted to me that it's
more for Aesthetics than anything else else with that said it does a fantastic
job of what it's trying to do which is improve the Aesthetics of the board this
one is plastic they've also said that while they have observed a slight
temperature improvements particularly in certain areas like around the PCI
Express slots where a lot of the time those graphics cards are going to be
kicking off more heat than the motherboard itself so it actually serves
to Shield the motherboard from the heat of other components more than help the
motherboard cool itself in that case um but other than that it it doesn't really
do too much in terms of cooling on this particular motherboard's implementation
next up is their cross chill now I really like the way that they've used
these stylized rubber plugs here as opposed to just having the Barb stick
out on the last generation board and then having little rubber plugs that are easy to get lost so this allows you to
run the board either completely passively with u you know supplemental
air cooling with something like an antech spot cool or by putting your own
G1 quarter fittings on here and integrating it into your custom loop
with that said um unless you're running an anti-corrosive additive such as
ethylene glycol I probably wouldn't recommend running this particular thing
in your Loop because it does have aluminum internals as opposed to Copper
internals and depending on who you ask of course aluminum can be fine in this
or that case and it's probably going to be okay and it probably will but I've
seen enough problems with corrosion eating away at aluminum components
inside water cooling Loops that it is not something that I would personally
feel comfortable using unless I had a good anti-corrosive additive so if you
use something like swifttech hydrix then you're going to be golden now let's
start with the overall tour of the board up here in the top we find that ngff
mpcie combo 2 Port where we can put our wireless module as well as an ngff or M2
SSD we've got a fan header a four pin
and 8 Pin power connector so while it's not the Maximus 6 Extreme which includes
their OC panel it's OC panel compatible and it's certainly extreme overclocking
compatible I mean not again not necessarily quite to the same extent as
the Maximus 6 Extreme although it does support some cool stuff including their
GPU hot wire which allows you to overvolt ASUS gpus that support the
feature on this particular board it has their M button which allows you to
diagnose post errors that are caused by memory not really working correctly V
checkpoints as well as an onboard post readout start and reset switches built
in there's something I wanted to draw your attention to it's over here I was
looking for it that's their patent pending four pin three pin and detecting
CPU uh fan connector so it'll actually automatically configure your fan control
which of course it has their latest fan control software which you can access
through uh fan expert fan expert 2 I believe is the iteration which you
can access through AI Suite allowing you to have full control of every fan that
is plugged into the board but anyway this one will detect on its own with no
intervention from the user four dual Channel DDR3 ports as well as an LGA
1150 socket support reporting the latest Haswell fourth generation Intel
processors the of course as you'll find on any Rog board the vrm is as pretty
much as highend as ASUS can build so this is their Digi plus gen 3 Extreme
Engine so you can configure anything you'd want from within the BIOS to very
very to a very minute degree of accuracy
um down the right hand Edge we find the 24 pin exactly where it belongs would
have liked to see that front USB 3 connector on our right angle that's one
thing where I think this board could still be improved we've got six SATA 3 6
GB per second ports running off the Intel chipset and four SATA 3 6 GB per
second ports running off of an additional chipset this is a feature
that's a carryover from the extreme board so it actually supports fast boot
on or off when you're particularly under subzero temperatures you might not
necessarily want it to boot up as quickly so you can actually turn fast
boot off all right we've got our front panel connectors as well as our front
panel uh USB 2 header only a single single USB 2 header on this board that's
very interesting there's that proprietary connector for the OC panel
the Thunderbolt header to add Thunderbolt support to the board with an
optional accessory trusted platform module auxiliary power for multiple
graphics cards although it should be noted that this board only supports
two-way SLI or up to three-way Crossfire
so that'll be running in 16x mode for a single card 8X 8X for dual cards or 8X
4X forx for triple cards and NVIDIA
doesn't support SLI operation on PCIe forx slots this is something that's kind
of cool check this out you guys so ASUS has actually left open-ended PCI Express
slots on all the PCI e1x slots so if you were to remove the thermal armor which
you can you would be able to install longer cards without any modding which I
think is pretty handy so anyway if you wanted to install more than two graphics cards I would recommend using the easy
plug right here we've got our front panel audio connector and it's ideal
location on the bottom left of the board as well as that red line audio
separation for the completely separate PCB so it's completely separate from the
rest of the PCB it's as isolated as their old Supreme effects
implementations where they had a separate PCIe Riser card except that
it's built into the motherboard itself so talking to uh talking to JJ from ASUS
he said one of the tough questions that he always gets is well what is a great
onboard audio solution equivalent to in terms of an add-in card and he was
saying if you go to like a a lesser board such as the Maximus 6 hero for
example uh you're getting what's probably equivalent to something like a
Zonar DG or dgx so about a $35 audio
solution with this you're probably getting something that's a little bit
closer to a Zonar DX or about an $80 audio solution which from my experience
is going to be enough for most people who don't have like a golden audio file
ear and you're of course going to get things like their uh their onscreen
radar uh heads up display that shows you where the audio sounds are coming from I
actually asked JJ about this as well I was like has that been banned yet from
tournament play he's like uh I'm sure
that no tournament's going to allow you to use it but apparently it hasn't been formally banned yet it's meant more for
I think the casuals playing at home than uh for for tournament play um definitely
all right so we uh we've got eight four pin fan connectors one two three four uh
five six s eight and actually they're
very very well laid out so that you're going to be able to plug in kind of some
you know top fans such as in something like a Corsair 800d you got a couple
rear fans you got your CPU fan header and then you'll be able to plug in
something at the front of the case and or the bottom so very thoughtful layout
on that particular aspect of this board I think that's getting pretty close to
the end here so let's move around to the back where we've got Rog connect ah yes
the Rog connect button even though the cable's not included it does still
feature that functionality so you can hook it up to an external computer or laptop to control all of your over
overclocking settings at a hardware level so the cable you'll have to get on
your own but the functionality is still there BIOS Flashback 4 USB 2.0 ports six
USB 3.0 ports DisplayPort HDMI optical
audio out gigabit land provided by Intel
as well as 7.1 audio out oh it should be
noted that's a 127v Intel gigabit Lan chip that is
powering that right there thank you for checking out my unboxing and overview of
the Maximus 6 formula from isus don't forget subscribe to L Tech tips for more
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