ASUS Maximus VII Gene Review
Published by Hiwa Pouri on 22.05.14Page:
Conclusion
| General | + | - | |
| At a first glance the Maximus VII Gene definitely leaves a very good impression. The mix of overclocking features and high quality audio hardware makes this a state-of-the-art motherboard for mATX-gaming. And next to a very nice looking design you find useful features like for example GameFirst. This software allows you to configure your network device the way gaming traffic gets prioritized (keyword traffic shaping). Furthermore also on this board we find an M.2 slot that has been wired to the PCH using two PCIe lanes. This offers additional headroom for SSD makers to come up with new, even faster drives. | -
Design - Layout - mATX - M.2 Slot |
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| Layout | + | - | |
| Basically the ASUS Maximus VII Gene's Layout has been very well thought. Once more practical are the angled SATA connectors as well as the power- and reset-buttons. There is also a debug display which is very useful in case you should have issues with a component in your system or the board itself. Regarding the PCI-Express x16 slots there we have nothing to complain about. A closer look at the area around the CPU socket shows, that there is plenty of space to install big aircoolers without running into any issues. What we also liked is where the power and reset buttons are. Especially when you overclock memory using liquid nitrogen, then it makes sense to not have them next to the DIMM slots, since they will free quite quickly. Like with the Z87 based Maximus VI Impact also the Maximus VII Gene now gets ASUS' SupremeFX audio solution on an add-in-card. This allows for a cleaner PCB design and helps solving shielding related issues. Overclockers will also be happy about the voltage read-out points. Unfortunately there is one thing we really don't understand with ASUS Maximus VII motherboards: why are there no SATA Express connectors? | - Angled SATA connectors
- Power/Reset-Button onboard - Debug display - Space around the CPU socket |
- No SATA Express | |
| Performance | + | - | |
| Calculating the average of all 3D benchmarks we ran, we see that this board comes in on the excellent third rank in our comparison tables, which include values from all Z87 motherboards we've tested too. When taking the average of all 2D results, this board is even capable of sharing first position with the Maximus VI Formula. Although the early stage, it appears that ASUS already optimized the Gene's BIOS rather well. On another note, we had a look at power consumption and noticed that this isn't one of the most efficient motherboards we've had for testing so far. In case of idle power consumption we find this board in the middle of our charts and when it comes to load power consumption, it ranks slightly lower than that in our charts. | -
3D Performance - 2D Performance |
- Power consumption load | |
| 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 |
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| Recommendation | + | - | |
| These days, the ASUS Maximus VII Gene costs 160 Euro, which is ok in terms of value for money and for this kind of money you get an excellent mATX motherboard, which is perfectly suitable for compact gaming rigs as well as extreme overclocking setups. Unfortunately none of all the new ROG motherobards come with SATA Express, which is something you get with most other motherboards and Z97 chipset. Should you be thinking about building a new, compact gaming rig, then you should definitely have a very close look at this board. | -
Gaming - Overclocking - Enthusiast |
- No SATA Express | |
| Rating | |||
| We give the ASUS Maximus VII Gene very good 4.5 out of 5 stars. | |||
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