ASUS Maximus IX Formula Review
Published by Marc Büchel on 08.02.17Page:
Conclusion
| General | + | - | |
| A closer look at the motherboard lineup from ASUS reveals that the Maximus IX Formula theire highest-end model, regarding their gaming branded Z270 based products. Therefore it comes with a bunch of really neat features, like for example ASUS's SupremeFX audio solution, Aura RGB Lightning and two M.2 slots, VRM water cooling from EK Water Blocks and a great looking design. Nevertheless at a price of 352 Euro, this board is definitely costly for what you get. Sure the Maximus IX Formula is a good motherboard but in this price range even more could be expected, especially since other vendors sell equally equipped boards at a lower price. Apart from that this is a basis for a Kaby Lake platform that is as costly as a Broadwell-E platform. Considering this we really find the pricing of this particular product too steep. | -
Design - Layout |
- Price | |
| Layout | + | - | |
| The layout of the ASUS Maximus IX Formula has been well thought - as expected. Once more practical are the angled SATA connectors as well as the power- and reset-buttons and the debug LED. Apart from that we like the placement of the PCI-Express x16 slots. There is a total of three full sized PCI Express slots and four PCIe x1 slots. Two of the three full-size PCIe slots receive metal reinforcements and these slots are two slots apart. This means that there is plenty of space for graphics card in multi GPU setups to breathe. When it comes to the M.2 slots we would like to see a different implementation as we made clear in the first paragraph on page 5 of this review. | -
Angled SATA
connectors - Space around the CPU socket - Placement of PCIe slots |
- Vertical M.2 slot - M.2 slot underneath cover | |
| Performance | + | - | |
| Calculating the average of all 3D benchmarks results we ran, we see that this board scores 3rd. When taking the average of all 2D results, this board comes in 2nd out of 24 boards tested. On another note, we had at energy efficiency where this board scores 14th. | - 2D Performance |
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| Overclocking / BIOS | + | - | |
| The UEFI BIOS gets a black background and there are a few additional red and white design elements. Meanwhile it's almost normal that a BIOS is complete, offering countless features. If you're looking for overclocking options you'll find a great many of them and they are equally practical for novices and extreme overclockers. We always love the pre-defined profiles, which make overclocking quite a bit more efficient. Boosting our CPU to 5.2 GHz was absolutely no problem at all. | - Sheer amount of
options - Design |
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| Recommendation | + | - | |
| The Maximus IX Formula is a well equipped Z270 motherboard. This board is also quick accourding to our 2D and 3D benchmarks we're running. At the moment this is the fifth Intel Z270 motherboard that we have added to our charts and comparing to models based on Intel's Z170 chipset it's definitely quick. We chose to use an Intel Core i7-6700K processor to be able to compare the performance with other boards we've reviewed previously reviewed. This motherboard definitely comes with a vast feature set yet the price of 352 Euro excluding shipping costs is pretty steep. | - Price | ||
| System von MIFCOM | |||
| Should you be looking for an individually configurable system, which can be equipped with this motherboard, then we recommend you the Gaming Mini-PC Core i7-7700K from MIFCOM. | |||
| Rating | |||
| We give the ASUS Maximus IX Formula excellent 4 out of 5 stars. | |||
| Navigate through the articles | |
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