Home / Tech News / Highlights-new / Asus Maximus VI Hero (Z87) Motherboard Review

Asus Maximus VI Hero (Z87) Motherboard Review

SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. It should provide most of the information (including undocumented) you need to know about your hardware, software and other devices whether hardware or software.

Sandra is a (girl’s) name of Greek origin that means “defender”, “helper of mankind”. We think that’s quite fitting.

It works along the lines of other Windows utilities, however it tries to go beyond them and show you more of what’s really going on. Giving the user the ability to draw comparisons at both a high and low-level. You can get information about the CPU, chipset, video adapter, ports, printers, sound card, memory, network, Windows internals, AGP, PCI, PCI-X, PCIe (PCI Express), database, USB, USB2, 1394/Firewire, etc.

Native ports for all major operating systems are available:

  • Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x86)
  • Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x64)
  • Windows 2003/R2, 2008/R2* (IA64)
  • Windows Mobile 5.x (ARM CE 5.01)
  • Windows Mobile 6.x (ARM CE 5.02)

All major technologies are supported and taken advantage of:

  • SMP – Multi-Processor
  • MC – Multi-Core
  • SMT/HT – Hyper-Threading
  • MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE 4.1, SSE 4.2, AVX, FMA – Multi-Media instructions
  • GPGPU, DirectX, OpenGL – Graphics
  • NUMA – Non-Uniform Memory Access
  • AMD64/EM64T/x64 – 64-bit extensions to x86
  • IA64 – Intel* Itanium 64-bit

Sandra Arithmetic

sandra-arith-1sandra-arith-oc-1

sandra memory bandwidth

sandra-mem-band-1sandra-mem-band-oc-1

The Hero scores highly in Sandra's processor arithmetic test, and memory bandwidth performance is equally as impressive as the Maximus VI Extreme's.

Become a Patron!

Check Also

MSI MAG X870 Tomahawk Review

Looking for a good value X870 board that still offers solid features?

8 comments

  1. lovely board and nice to see a more reasonable price point for the majority of us. While the maximus extreme was impressive, it was also priced at a years car insurance for me!

  2. ROG boards are excellent, well built and nicely designed. I do think ASUS are facing more competition in the high end with Z87 however from MSI and gigabyte and even asrock. any chance of a review of the asrock OC formula high end?

  3. Ben, keep your eye out for that board in the coming days ;-)!

  4. awesome, I like asrock too, good prices. This board is a good setup, interesting to see the 3,000mhz memory didnt work. but its £400 right? cant see too many people buying that.

  5. Good reviews Luke, nicely detailed. DO you think its worth the money to get the ROG extreme over this? I would ideally like to use 3,000mhz next year. I wonder if they can fix the bios, or if its just not as good as the extreme for this kind of support.

  6. Hi Barry, That’s a tough question to answer, and one that depends entirely on personal preference and usage. If you’re going for extreme overclocking with extreme cooling, the Maximus VI Extreme is a great choice and well optimised for those conditions.

    If it’s high-speed memory support that you’re specifically after, I would think that compatibility will be improved with future BIOS updates. The Maximus VI Hero does support 3000MHz kits, according to the DRAM QVL, just not quite the one that we tested (not with two sticks, at least).

  7. Thank you for the review.

    But I am looking forward to the Formula review more ^^

  8. If I buy this board will I get banned in fps games like cod?

    Is Sonic radar is a reason for ban?