ASUS ROG Maximus VII Formula Review

ASUS Maximus VII Formula Review

Introduction

Yes, you can finally stop flooding our social media feeds and the OC3D Forums with your requests for the full on ASUS Maximus VII Formula review. It’s here. So find a comfy spot and settle in.

If you’ve been following along, and you have haven’t you, then you’ll know that the Intel Z97 chipset is an absolute stone cold stunner, with plenty of features and enough performance that pretty much every motherboard we’ve looked at so far has been outstanding. The ASUS Maximus VII models in particular have been staggering, providing fantastic performance and looks at rock bottom prices. 

The Ranger was stripped down, but not lacking in features. The Hero was a noticeable step up in both looks and performance. Now, with the Maximus VII Formula we have the model that represents the ROG motherboard that finds a home in more systems than any others, the Formula.

The big change with the model range comes as a twofold adjustment. Firstly because we’ve reviewed the “lesser” models first, we know that you can have extraordinary amounts of performance and specifications for a very low price, so the Formula needs to offer a lot extra to justify the inflated price point. Secondly, we’ve heard that there wont be an Extreme variant of the Maximus VII, so the Formula is now at the top of the tree. This will add yet more pressure on it to deliver in spades. So let’s find out if it does.

Technical Specifications

There are plenty of updates to the Formula when compared to its Z87 predecessor. ASUS have helpfully highlighted these in red for an easy ‘at a glance’ view. Sadly red on black doesn’t work very well with the JPEG compression format, despite running at 100% quality. Then again any text on a black background is hard to read. So this specification table is brought to you courtesy of your local optician.

If you have been keeping up with what the Z97s have to offer then a lot of this will be very familiar to you. The big changes are faster DDR3 (up to 3300MHz), updated Intel I218-V LAN port that annihilates the KillerNIC for traffic shaping, SATA Express support for blistering transfer speed, improved ASUS Sonic sound reproduction, full PWM support on all 8 fan headers and finally the expected incremental updates to the ASUS technologies.

ASUS Maximus VII Formula Preview     ASUS Maximus VII Formula Preview  

ASUS Maximus VII Formula Preview     ASUS Maximus VII Formula Preview

Below is our video when we first previewed the board giving you a good upclose look at the board and the contents of the box.