ASUS Maximus VII Hero Review
Published by Hiwa Pouri on 11.05.14Page:
Conclusion
| General | + | - | |
| The first impression that the ASUS Maximus VII Hero leaves is definitely a good one. Once again we liked the ROG design, which meanwhile belongs to the evergreens in the industry. It is always remarkable to see that with every single generation ASUS manage to improve the looks of their ROG series motherboards. Basically, this board offers everything to set up a decent overclocking rig since there is a capable power design featuring only the high-quality components, such as for instance black-metallic caps. In addition to that, there is the ROG BIOS with a plethora of settings related to overclocking, but still, being well organized for you to find the settings needed reasonably fast. | -
Design - Layout - Features |
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| Layout | + | - | |
| The ASUS Maximus VII Hero's layout has been very well thought. You get practical angled SATA connectors as well as the power- and reset-buttons. There is also a debug display which is very useful in case you run into any issues with a component in your system or the board itself. Even the placement of the PCI-Express x16 is very well chosen. Between the first and the second PCI Express x16 slot there are two free slots which means that the first card in a SLI/CrossFire setup gets plenty of fresh air. Apart from that, there is generally a lot of space on this board since, it has not been squeezed to the rim with features. Basically, this is yet another advantage of a "not so pricey" motherboard. Should you use this motherboard for extreme overclocking, then you will find it easy to isolate. If you are, on the other hand, a gamer, and you want to install a big CPU cooler then there is plenty of space to even install the biggest air coolers on the market. Regarding the onboard audio, we like the fact that it has been shielded from the other onboard components. Furthermore there are high-quality ELNA capacitors and we have to say, the result is overall pleasing. | - Angled SATA connectors
- Power/Reset-Button onboard - Debug display - Space around the CPU socket - Audio Solution |
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| Performance | + | - | |
| Calculating the average of all 3D benchmarks we ran, we see that this board ranks in the middle of our 3D benchmarks performance test which includes the Z87 motherboards. To be precise, the ASUS Maximus VII Hero ranked eleventh. When taking the average of all 2D results, the board ranks very close to the end of our chart. You might have noticed that the SuperPi 32m is rather slow, which is a good indicator for loose tCKE and tWCLtimings as well as RTL timings. Unfortunately, we are still not sure if this will be the performance of the new Intel Z97 Express chipset or is it only an early BIOS which needs to be tweaked by the ROG BIOS team. On another note, we had a look at power consumption and noticed something rather interesting. In idle the new Z97 Maximus VII Hero shows 7 Watts higher than the Maximus VI Hero with Z87 chipset while under load the difference between two boards are 4 Watts. | -
PC Mark Web browsing - UC Bench - Fire Strike and 3Dmark 11 - Metro Last Night |
- Super Pi 32M - SisSoft Sandra |
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| Overclocking / BIOS | + | - | |
| ASUS has a beautiful looking BIOS when it comes to their ROG series motherboard. The UEFI BIOS gets a black background instead of red background which was used on earlier ROG series, as well as a new interface called EzMode, where we can monitor different temperatures, see the system information and also set XMP profiles on system memory. We tested the latest BIOS sent by ASUS which is still not a retail one. Overclocking the Intel Haswell CPU to 5.0GHz was not difficult and we also tested different memory ICs, including MFR and CFR from Hynix as well as Samsung ones, the motherboard managed to be stable and easily reach over 3.0GHz with MFR ICs. Trying PowerChip and BBSE we could not reach anything higher than 2600MHz, while we could do over 2700MHz with Z87 ROG boards. Powerchip and BBSE are used only for Extreme Overclocking which means that we will have to wait a little bit longer until the new BIOS fixes are out. | - Sheer amount of
options - Design |
-BIOS need to be improved | |
| Recommendation | + | - | |
| When ASUS first introduced the Maximus VI Hero, which is the predecessor of the Maximus VII Hero, that we tested here, the Hero marked the entrance into ASUS's premium ROG line. Meanwhile ASUS decided to change their strategy a little bit and add the ranger to the bottom end of the ROG Maximus motherboard series and therefore the Hero is not the cheapest ROG motherboard anymore. In the end we expect the price of this piece of hardware to be around 165 Euro, which would be rather reasonable. After all the Hero is an interesting board and if the price is going to be attractive it will also be successful. | -
Price
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Gaming - Enthusiast - Overclocking |
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| Rating | |||
| We give the ASUS Maximus VII Hero very good 4 out of 5 stars. | |||
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