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Asus Maximus VI Formula (Z87) Motherboard Review

CyberLink MediaEspresso 6 is the successor to CyberLink MediaShow Espresso 5.5. With its further optimized CPU/GPU-acceleration, MediaEspresso is an even faster way to convert not only your video but also your music and image files between a wide range of popular formats.

Now you can easily playback and display your favourite movies, songs and photos not just on your mobile phone, iPad, PSP, Xbox, or Youtube and Facebook channels but also on the newly launched iPhone 4. Compile, convert and enjoy images and songs on any of your computing devices and enhance your videos with CyberLink’s built-in TrueTheater Technology.

New and Improved Features

  • Ultra Fast Media Conversion – With support from the Intel Core i-Series processor family, ATI Stream & NVIDIA CUDA, MediaEspresso’s Batch-Conversion function enables multiple files to be transcoded simultaneously.
  • Smart Detect Technology – MediaEspresso 6 automatically detects the type of portable device connected to the PC and selects the best multimedia profile to begin the conversion without the need for user’s intervention.
  • Direct Sync to Portable Devices – Video, audio and image files can be transferred in a few easy steps to mobile phones including those from Acer, BlackBerry, HTC, Samsung, LG, Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and Palm, as well as Sony Walkman and PSP devices.
  • Enhanced Video Quality – CyberLink TrueTheater Denoise and Lighting enables the enhancement of video quality through optical noise filters and automatic brightness adjustment.
  • Video, Music and Image File Conversion – Convert not only videos to popular formats such as AVI, MPEG, MKV, H.264/AVC, and FLV at the click of a button, but also images such as JPEG and PNG and music files like WMA, MP3 and M4A.
  • Online Sharing – Conversion to video formats used by popular social networking websites and a direct upload feature means posting videos to Facebook and YouTube has never been easier.

For our testing today we are converting a 4.4GB 720p MKV file (1h:58mins) to Apple Mp4 format for playback on a portable device. This is a common procedure for many people and will give a good indication of system power.

media-espresso-settings

Hardware acceleration is disabled to provide an accurate interpretation of the CPU performance.

MediaEspresso

media-espresso-1espresso-oc-1

A one second advantage over ASRock's Z87 OC Formula gives the Asus Maximus VI Formula joint-first position in the MediaEspresso test.

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6 comments

  1. Have mine ordered, cant wait to get it. thanks for the review. ive just bought some 2,800mhz memory, hope it works!

  2. I really dislike the thermal armor, had it on my sabertooth and took it off, makes no difference and makes getting at some buttons tricky. good board though.

  3. Christopher Hall-Nelson

    Great read Luke, looks like another winner for ASUS, but I fail to see the benefits of the armor really unless you added fans to circulate air underneath it. It would isolate GPU heat from above, that is good, but the stagnant air underneath the plastic would stay close to the capacitors, right? Am I missing something?

  4. OMG it’s here. >.< Thank you so much for the review.

    If I didin't already have this at hand ( arrived yesterday), I would have been worried because of the rating, which BTW I don't understand why the low rating seeing as it didn't do that bad at all. In fact I had to read the whole review carefully to see where it all went wrong but for the life of me, I can't find the negatives that matter. I only use one card so the lane speed issue doesn't affect me and By the Gods, Extreme and Hero don't have anything on how sexy This Beast looks or just how awesomely powerful it feels in hand. I would gladly drop the extra cash just for those looks alone.

    Now that I have seen no real issues where performance is concerned, I have no regrets for skipping Ivy-E this time around in favour of Has well. And it was all because of this sexy thing.

    Thank you again for the review Luke, can I use you name?

  5. “A small minority of users may miss the support for 3-way SLI, and an even lesser number will frown at the headaches caused by two Nvidia cards being simultaneously used with a PCI-E x2 or x4 expansion device.”

    What about a PCI-E x1 device? I have a SoundBlaster X-Fi I would like to use along with 2 770 GTXs in SLI.

  6. Simon,

    The two graphics cards can be installed in the upper x16-length slots to use the CPU’s PCI-E 3.0 lanes (split as x8/x8 for each card).

    If you install the PCI-E x1 sound card in one of the dedicated x1 slots, it will receive a PCI-E 2.0 lane from the Z87 chipset, and will not affect the bandwidth provided to your graphics cards.