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The Asus Maximum IV Gene Z board is a UEFI driven configuration, which immediately earns it bonus points. We love the new UEFI interface driven menus. The motherboard had no problems detecting and working with our Intel Core i7 2600k processor. While this will be great for newbies, bios gurus will want to skip the basic screen and enter into advanced mode.
Advanced mode opens up a whole new array of tabbed panels for fine tuning and overclocking. The Main panel gives a basic overview of the bios revision, system, processor and date and time.
The advanced panel offers device configuration as well as panels to allow adjustments to the iROG configuration
The monitor panel is self explanatory, giving access to various panels for monitoring voltage and temperatures.
The Boot menu offers adjustments to the boot configuration, including the priority of the hard drives or SSD drives installed.
There are a variety of voltage settings for the user to tweak and adjust, to enhance overclocking capabilities and stability.
The GPU.DIMM post option is extremely useful as we can check on the graphics card status. Above we have shown two pictures of the system with a single, and then two graphics cards installed.
Voltage settings are extensive, this will really hit the spot with the overclocking enthusiast audience.
There are many preset overclocking options in this board, which takes away the problems of working out voltages and settings, by using a table of pre-generated configurations based around the identity of the processor currently installed.
The Artificial intelligence overclocking section of the bios gives automatic, manual, or X.M.P. overclocked settings. by simple menu options. Additionally, the CPU level up button gives several presets for the Core i7 2600k – 4.2ghz and 4.6ghz.
For this review we will be showing results from the prebuilt 4.6ghz setting built into this bios. Manually we achieved around 4.8ghz with high end air cooling (more is possible but high grade water cooling would be needed), much like any other enthusiast grade board we have reviewed recently.
The Corsair memory we are using was detected as 1333mhz memory with 9-9-9 timings. So we manually adjusted it to 1600mhz with 7-7-7 timings, which are the recommended settings. Other memory we tested (rated at 9-9-9) detected fine without manual adjustments. It is worth paying attention to this configuration in case your memory is running under specification.
awesome, makes the sapphire Mini ITX H67 look rather feeble IMO.
Price is very impressive for the spec. quite surprised a ROG product isnt £200+
Very nice board, as always from the ROG team……. cheaper than the last one which is always a bonus.
@ francis. they arent the same style of board, one is mini and one is micro. big difference for chassis
gene series has been class leading for a long time now, glad to see it continuing
Can you tell me if this board works well with patriot memory? I had a terrible time with the last model and my memory not working right. took me ages to find out what the problem was as a second board was not posting also…..
How carefully have you actually checked that “onboard” supreme X-Fi audio chip?
Can you point out the chip on the board, and that its from Creative Laps?
Cause the Wiki says “Supreme X-Fi” on mainboards is just software, paired with a generic audio chip from outfits like Realtec and others. If this really was just software, it would be kind of lame and obviously have no influence on signal to noise ratio or THD, since that depends on the chip used, not some sound beautifier software that eats your CPU cycles for mostly questionable improvements…
I have no found a single review on this board that checks on this, they all just seem to copy the menu point from the box into their review.