Gadgetory

by a qualifying Intel product and get entered in the Intel dynamic ticket giveaway for a chance to win great prizes is it Intel gaming promo com to learn more welcome to my unboxing of the Maximus 6 formula from a soos 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 NIC solution with prioritization with that said that's included on a lot of the other issues boards but where 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 Elna premium audio capacitors audio capacitors are not necessarily the same as regular capacitors you can have a great capacitor that's not necessarily fantastic for audio applications alright so they've also got what else what else did they have to say about themselves here supreme FX shielding EMI protection cover okay differential design with premium op amps Premium op amps is definitely important here why mah film capacitors from Hema rather sorry saris logic CS a43 98 DAC and they also have ATP a 6-1 to 0 a 2 a 600 ohm hi-fi headphone amp so they sue this 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 theirs donor 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 op amps on their onboard solutions but it should be noted that per a thread on the audio section of the Linus tech tips forum swappable op amps isn't necessarily a good thing you shouldn't 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 thousand horsepower end 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 so 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 six 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 cute connectors a door hanger enter champion to break and do not disturb it champion in action I think they got a bit of a champion to break it I think they meant on break but whatever ah we've got an antenna for the built-in wireless AC as well as their combo card that I personally really like so it includes both Wireless and an NG F F slot so that you can install a mini SSD that'll can that will actually interface with PCI Express rather than with a SATA interface like you would an M SATA because on a desktop let's face it what is the point of installing an M SATA SSD it doesn't perform any better it's just you have lots of room alright next up we've got the i/o shield as well as eight serial ata three cables four which are right angle 4 which are straight and those little handy ROG labels for your SATA cables 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 secksy motherboard both b-roll and I are in agreement that out of everything we've looked at so far this is going to be the best-looking motherboard we've encountered they've even done a few things that I think are just just exceptional so I want to point those out right off the bat so number one is there rog armor so there is a top plate as well as a backplate 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 heatsink the board is less likely to bow and Lexx 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 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 a soos themselves admitted to me that it's more for aesthetics than anything 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 but other than that it doesn't really do too much in terms of cooling on this particular motherboards 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 then having little rubber plugs that are easy to get lost so this allows you to run the board either completely passively with you know supplemental air cooling with something like an mtech spot cool or by putting your own geelong quarter fittings on here and integrating it into your custom loop with that said unless you're running an anti corrosive additives 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 and 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 swift Tec heydrich s-- 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 end PFF M PCIe combo two-port where we can put our wireless module as well as an NG F F or m2 SSD we've got a fan header a four pin and eight pin power connector so while it's not the Maximus six extreme which includes their OC panel it so C panel compatible and it's certainly extreme overclocking compatible I mean not again not necessarily quite to the same extent as the Maximus six extreme although it does support some cool stuff including their GPU hotwire which allows you to over volt Asus GPUs that support the feature on this particular board it has their mmmokay 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 there that's their patent pending for pin three pin and detecting CPU 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 fan expert fan expert to I believe is the iteration Ron 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 for dual channel ddr3 ports as well as an LGA 1150 socket supporting the latest has well fourth generation Intel processors the of course as you'll find on any rog board the vrm is as pretty much as high end as Asus can build so this is their DIGI+ Gen 3 extreme engine so you can configure anything you'd want from within the BIOS to very very mine to a very minut degree of accuracy 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 three six gigabit per second ports running off the Intel chipset and for say two three six gigabit 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 fastboot on or off when you're particularly under sub-zero temperatures you might not necessarily want it to boot up as quickly so you can actually turn fast boot off alright we've got our front panel nectars as well as our front panel USB to header only a single USB to 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 3-way crossfire so that will be running in 16x mode for a single card 8 X 8 X for dual cards or 8 X for X 4 X 4 triple cards and NVIDIA doesn't support SLI operation on PCIe 4x 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 PCIe 1x 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 redline 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 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 lesser board such as the Maximus 6 hero for example you're getting what's probably equivalent to something like a zone Rd G or DG X so about a $35 audio solution with this you're probably getting something that's a little bit closer to a zone Rd X 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 audiophile ear and you're of course going to get things like their their on-screen radar heads-up display that shows you where the audio sounds are coming from I actually asked JJ about this as well as like has that been banned yet from tournament play he's like ah I'm sure that no tournaments going to allow you to use it but apparently informally Bend yet it's meant more for I think the casuals playing at home then for for tournament play definitely all right so we've we've got eight eight for pin fan connectors one two three four five six seven 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 800 D 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 is the ROG connect button even though the cables 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 overclocking settings at a hardware level so the cable you'll have to get on your own but if the functionality is still there BIOS flashback for USB 2.0 ports six USB 3.0 ports DisplayPort HDMI optical audio out Gigabit LAN provided by Intel as well as 7.1 audio out oh it should be noted that's a 12 17 V Intel Gigabit LAN chip that is powering that right there thank you for checking out my unboxing an overview of the Maximus 6 formula from a soos don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips for more unboxings reviews and other computer 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