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Asus Maximus VI Formula (Z87) Motherboard Review

With its emergence as the new standard for high-speed portable devices, USB 3.0 performance on a modern motherboard needs to be good to ensure that data transferral bottlenecks aren't created.

We tested USB 3.0 performance using an ADATA SP300 SSD connected to an Icy Box IB-223StU3 USB 3.0 enclosure (ASMedia ASM1051 controller). ATTO was the benchmark used.

USB 3

usb-3

Using Asus' UASP-activating USB 3.0 Boost software that is bundled with its AI Suite III package, the Maximus VI Formula's SuperSpeed ports take our SSD's transfer rates to their limits.

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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.