Asus Maximus VI Impact Unboxing & Overview
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2014-05-07
·
2,054 words · ~10 min read
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Buy a qualifying Intel product and get entered in the Intel Dynamic Ticket
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Giveaway for a chance to win great prizes. Visit intelgamingromo.com to
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learn more. This, you guys, is the board that people like me have been waiting
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for ever since EVGA released their NF4
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NATX SLI ready board. The whole concept
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of high-performance fullyfeatured small
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motherboards is extremely exciting to nerds like me who get excited about
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small fully featured motherboards. So this is about look I mean look how look
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how full to the brim the accessory package is for the first
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MITx ROG motherboard. So here we go.
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Let's get into this because I'm pretty darn stoked. One of the big problems
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with many ITX systems is that you can
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only have one expansion slot, which means that if you're a storage
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enthusiast, you're fine. Throw a RAID card in there. If you're a graphics
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enthusiast, you're fine. Throw a graphics card in there. If you're an
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audio enthusiast, you're fine. Throw a great sound card in there. But what if
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you happen to be enthusiastic about two of those things? Now you're boned
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because it's only got a single PCI Express 16x slot. even on high-end
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boards. As ASUS has addressed that in a
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very very meaningful way. So, we'll start with the accessories here. So,
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first up, oh yeah, high-end networking enthusiasts, don't worry, you'll be
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fine. Wireless AC, that is dualband 2.4
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5 GHz wireless AC is built into this
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board on their MPCIE combo 2 module. So,
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this acts not only as a wireless AC card, but also as an NGFF or M2
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expansion slot, so you can put upcoming SSDs in there as well. So, these two go
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together just like uh previous generation Intel uh antennas. You can
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actually stick this to something that's made of metal, which I, go figure, don't
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have here, but anyway, you can stick it to the side of your case or whatever else, as long as it's not made of
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aluminum. All right, next up, we've got some SATA cables. So, there's uh four
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SATA cables, two straight uh oh, all straight. No right angle SATA cables.
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This board, unlike the i Deluxe board, only has four SATA ports compared to six
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on the other one because this is more of a gaming centric board as opposed to a,
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you know, storage or media center ccentric build. With that said, it has a
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cool media center feature I'll tell you about later. All right. Uh, no, I'm
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saving this one for later. We've got a couple of different screws for mounting
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various things to the board, such as the wireless module. Okay, we've got uh
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whatever the devil this is. Looks like a
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Whoops. And I'm knocking the box around. Who knows what he's going to do next.
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Oh, this is way better. they should
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include this on all of their new boards instead of the Q connector, which I've
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always felt is a very cludgy solution because it uh dramatically increases the
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profile of the front panel connectors as
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well as um like just you know not
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feeling very sturdy and just being very wobbly. This right here is an expand or
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as an extender for it. So, it plugs in as one unit just like the Q connector
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and then you can actually extend them somewhere where it's more convenient to plug them in. That's great, ASUS, if
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you're watching and I know you are. This on every board, get rid of Q connector.
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Love it. Great idea. All right, we've
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got an IO shield. And then finally, this, my friends, is where I start to
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geek out. This is the Supreme FX Impact.
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This is a sound card that is also
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intended to be used at well as a sound
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card and can be used without taking up your PCI Express slot. So remember guys,
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you can get 5.1 output by reconfiguring
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jacks. So that's that's a thing, but
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you're going to be probably mostly using this as kind of your headphone out and
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microphone in. I mean, what is this board designed for? More like LAN use.
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And if you really wanted to run a whole bunch of speakers off of it, you're
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probably going to want to use an external DAC and the optical connector right here. But this, my friends, is
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what makes it possible to have a truly high-end machine from every perspective
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that I can think of on an MITx board. So what they've achieved here is probably
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something similar to uh well, ASUS is telling me this is second only to the
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Maxima 6 formula in terms of the Supreme FX implementation. So, you have their I
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forget what they call it, but it's uh uh yes, sonic radar feature, which
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allows you to see visually where sounds are coming from, but that's much less
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important to me than the fact that you've got a 15 decel signal to noise
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ratio. And you've got a lot of the technologies that we've come to expect
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from Zonar cards built into something that comes with your motherboard. And
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so, this is probably equivalent to somewhere in the range of a $35 to $50
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dedicated audio solution, and it comes with your board. It also is able to
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drive up to 600 ohm headphones. So that
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is very very high impedance headphones either off of the rear port or even off
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of the front port. So they have configured it so that you're not going
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to get necessarily a hugely deteriorated
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audio experience off your front panel port like you see with many audio
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solutions that might otherwise be very high-end. So extremely exciting. They've
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also got one other cool mediacentric feature that allows you to, if you have
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it configured correctly, have the board completely powered off as long as it
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just has standby power and you can actually plug something into the line in
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in the front of the case. So that would be a microphone jack is would probably
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be coated on on the front and then have that come out of the line out on the
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back of the motherboard. So you can actually run content through the
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speakers that are connected to it even when the board is not powered up. So
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that's that's kind of neat as long as they're amped speakers. So, let's move
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on to the actual layout of the board itself. So, right here, this is impact
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power, compact dynamo of full scale
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power. These chokes can handle up to 60
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amps of power. So, it uses the same Blackwing chokes and 10K black metallic
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solid state capacitors that are going to give you better temperature tolerance,
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cooler operation, much longer lifetime than generic capacitors. And all of this
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is on an MITx board. The first time we saw this was with the
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P8Z77i Deluxe, which was the MITx board
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last generation. So, this is an even higherend implementation. It looks
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better. God, man, it looks better. Here's the uh like huge solid metal
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connectors that lead from the general PCB to the There you go. I hope you guys
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can see that those like massive think of it in terms of like you know thicker
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thicker lines for transmitting power means less loss and more more stability
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for the current to flow. So there you go. They're taking it very seriously
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putting the VRM up here. All right, let's move along to the Oh man, that
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looks looks so good. Water cool this. Put like a nice block there. Dead sexy.
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Anyway, uh two DDR3 um dual channel slots so you can
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run up to 16 gigs with uh currently available DDR3 modules. The eight pin
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and 24 pin connectors are right next to each other. This I've never really seen
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before. And it really depends on the MATX case you use whether these are
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optimal configurations for them, but you shouldn't have too much trouble. Onboard
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start as well as onboard. Hopefully this
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is reset, but it's not actually labeled. So guys, let me know if I'm wrong on
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that one. We've got an onboard USB 3 front panel header as well as those four
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SATA ports I was talking about before. The MPCIE Combo 2 actually goes down
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here at the bottom of the board as opposed to on the larger desktop boards
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where we're used to seeing it uh up closer to the top. You've got four four
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pin fan connectors that are all configurable from within Fan Expert 2.
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So there's one here and then three actually clustered up here in the top
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left corner, including their patent pending one that detects and automatically configures for three pin
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or four pin fan control for your CPU.
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Um, you've also got an LG 1150 socket. I
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guess that's important. So, you can run the latest Haswell processors, including the 4770K. And then you can overclock
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the snot out of it because you're on a very, very sort of desktop grade like
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miniITX board. On the back, in terms of IO, we've got that optical audio port
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that I talked about before, HDMI and DisplayPort out, as well as their
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impact control. And what the impact control on the back here does is it adds
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more functionality. So you can see it's a little PCB riser that would normally
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be on the board itself, but there wasn't enough room. So we've got a post
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readout, which is cool because you can actually read it from outside the case,
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as well as the memo K button and direct key BIOS flashback and ROG connect,
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which they no longer include the cable for, but the hardware implementation is
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still there. So as long as you have a USB A to cable, you can get that going
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no problem. Four USB 2.0 ports, four USB 3.0 0 ports. ESATA is something we've
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started to see less of, but there it is. It's on this board. And an Intel gigabit
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nick supporting their game first packet prioritization technology through ASUS's
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AI suite, too. Now, they also include their usual value ad software with RG
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board. So, that is Kasperski antivirus demon tools as well as their RAM
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software. So, I think that pretty much covers it, guys. Would I recommend the
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Maximus 6 Impact? The answer is yes. If
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you want the very best possible experience for gaming for an MITx build,
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this is pretty much the way to go. They have a new generation i Deluxe. If you
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want more SATA ports, then that one, I guess, looks pretty compelling. Um, if
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you want their four-way optimization, which is their EPU as well as CPU clock
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speed, uh, the VRM control, there's a b there's a bunch of stuff that it does to
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optimize your system for power as well as performance. um that is not how ROG
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boards overclock with their one button overclocking whereas the other one is like it's like dynamic and it figures it
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out on its own. These use CPU level up. So if you really want that functionality
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then go for it. Otherwise I really would prefer personally to go with the ROG
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board and do it manually because
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man between this and the and the six formula like I I can't think of another
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board that I would necessarily buy.
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Don't forget to subscribe to Lance Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos. Don't forget to
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like this video if you liked it, dislike it if you disliked it. Leave me a
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comment and let me know what you think about this board. And I know you're
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considering not leaving a comment, James, but you should probably do it.