as ausa's highest end Rog z97
motherboard the Maximus 7 formula has all the bells
and wait what sorry it's not supposed to come
with any bells or whistles this is a piece of computer hardware not a summer
camp counselor preparedness
kit Cooler Master V series semi modular
power supplies feature 80 plus gold efficiency and their gold guarantee
5-year warranty click now to learn more obviously I meant figurative bells and
whistles with CPU performance pretty much equal across every motherboard
running a given chipset ausa's approach to justifying the high price of a
formula grade Republic of Gamers board is to load it chalk full of features
that they hope will enrich the gaming experience let's find out if they
succeeded first a physical tour it starts with the eye-catching plastic Rog
armor PL on the front of the board an attractive if not particularly
functional feature and a steel back plate something that may actually save
you a motherboard RMA if you have a tendency to accidentally scratch the
backs of your boards on motherboard standoffs the LGA 1150 socket is powered
by an 8 plus 4 pin connector setup although you only really need to plug in
one of them and thanks to the new improved Digi Plus 8 pH power design it
performs optimally with any Intel CPU that fits in it RAM is a similar story
with digital power delivery and support for up to 3,300 MHz DDR3 RAM in dual
Channel we're talking ddr4 type range
speed here onboard tweaker friendly dials include onboard power reset memo K
kbot and Sound Stage buttons more on those last two later and finally to go
along with a header for their external overclocking panel there are built-in
voltage checkpoints although I prefer the implementations of some other
manufacturers who include multimeter friendly adapters instead of relying on
my steady hands to get a reading moving further down the storage config of this
board is super premium in some ways with dual SATA Express slots one from the
Intel chipset and a second as media powered one Each of which can become two
SATA 3 slots for a total of 10 and yet kind of lacking in others with no rear
EA and while it has an m.2 slot on the
mpcie combo 3 thing that comes pre-loaded with a Bluetooth and dualband
AC wireless card the aforementioned m.2
only works with short style drives due to clearance issues with the Rog armor
maybe that's why ASUS also sent over their hyper m.2 X4 expansion card that
just plugs into a PCI Express lot something that's an extra for this board
it's not something that I'm likely to use soon with m.2 drives not being that
plentiful and not really offering a tangible performance benefit yet but
they also have other expansion options available such as their Thunderbolt 2
module that works on all of their z97 boards including this one with love to
get my hands on one of those PCI Express gen 3 expansion is handled by three PCI
e1x slots two PCIe 16x slots that are split to 8X 8X when both are in use and
a final PCIe 4X slot that can be used for a graphics card and three-way
Crossfire but unfortunately isn't usable for three-way SLI now three-way Graphics
configurations are not something that I really encourage anyway but I feel like
for someone dropping almost $400 on a motherboard these days it should
probably at least be an option anyway under these slots is ausa's best onboard
audio implementation yet highquality Dax
and premium audio grade capacitors aren't exactly new but what is new with
the 2014 edition of their Supreme FX audio solution is the ability to amplify
your games and music and provide a great listening experience no matter where you
plug into which with the number of people using front panel audio
connectors is a great step forward now let's take a quick look at the rear
panel with its useful clear seos button abundance of USB 3 ports and some people
won't care about this but I do PS2 Port
before moving on to the features and Extras that ASUS feels will help this
product justify it's high price compared to the more basic options that are also
available for DIY PC Builders first up
is the best onboard fan control setup I've yet seen on a motherboard it's got
eight sensibly positioned fan headers with what has become standard on ASUS
boards individual control control of either pwm or DC fans via curves that
can be adjusted according to onboard or manually positioned temp sensors awesome
next up is keybot an onboard chip that sits electrically between your USB port
and your keyboard and allows you to remap your F keys to other Keys macros
functions like media playback or program shortcuts the UI isn't particularly
intuitive but once you set it up it actually seems to work pretty well when
you toggle it on and off with this can be done in software or with an onboard
button for some reason there's a bit of a delay longer the first time but
nothing horrible it actually works on to sound features man are there a lot of
these first is their sonic radar which puts a visual representation of where
noises are coming from on the screen it lets you adjust opacity and turn it on
or off for different games with profiles next they've got their Sound Stage
Hardware level EQ presets they only work
on the front panel audio and if you live in bizarre Universe you can press an
onboard button to toggle them and use the post led to see if you're in FPS or
sports mode or whatever or if you're a normal person you can change them in the
control panel where you'll actually find a lot more stuff that I don't really use
like artificial Reverb effects smart EQ
and virtual surround the good news is that within the panel there's also a ton
of useful stuff like a software EQ DTS
settings and their voice Clarity feature to make in-game communication
pop a little bit more and be easier to hear in summary the hardware of the
audio on this board is great I mean it even Auto detects the impedance of your
headphones when you plug them in and adjust the output accordingly but there
are some dials in the software that many purists would never touch thankfully
they have a test feature so you can do ab listening to see what sounds best for
you I really wish they'd add a few more different sample audio tracks so that
would make it a little bit more useful on to game first networking the features
here are really cool and for a long time I actually had a killer Nick K1
installed in my personal system just to be able to meter bandwidth or prioritize
traffic between applications so this being powered by an Intel chipset
instead of a Bigfoot one should be much better but I've had a fair bit of
trouble with network connections working correctly with AI suite and game first
installed over the years and unfortunately this time around is no
exception with my network connection sometimes taking 5 to even 15 minutes to
start working correctly whenever I unplug it the Saving Grace is that once
it is running it works like awesome though so your mileage may vary let me
know in the comments how game first is working for you if you have an ASUS
motherboard and finally we've got their
cross chill copper air/water vrm cooler
and with this I think they finally nailed it mostly like last gen it's got
G14 thread so I can use my own fittings but this time we get copper internals so
I'm not mixing any Metals in my Loop way to go ASUS the only issue left is making
sure that there's enough clearance for large compressions for the people who
like those but my preferred 38 in thick wall ones fit just fine so this is a
total non-issue for me two thumbs up in the real world with a 4770k switching
from air to water let me go from 66° to
56° on the vrm sensor and AI site but I
feel like that sensor isn't really positioned to be truly representative of
the difference because the board feels much more cooler than that to the touch
which leads us to conclusion time is the Maximus 7 formula a luxury item or is it
a practical purchase I mean you do get some software extras like kasperski
antivirus demon tools Pro and a full copy of Watch Dogs yes it's Better Built
and looks a lot nicer than the other stuff and you do get those little Rog
extras like additional Support over the longer term but while I do see more
value in a high-end board these days now that generational CPU performance
improvements from Intel are so small that you're likely to get a few
Generations out of it I also think the same could be said about a susus z97 pro
which is available for a little over half the price so the bottom line is yes
it's a luxury item but at least it's a cool one guys like this video if you
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