ASUS Maximus VI Hero LGA 1150 Motherboard Review @ [H]

FrgMstr

FrgMstr

Just Plain Mean
Staff member
Joined
May 18, 1997
Messages
55,634
ASUS Maximus VI Hero LGA 1150 Motherboard Review - The ASUS Republic of Gamers brand represents the best ASUS has to offer. Unfortunately the best usually comes with a high price tag placing such boards out of reach for many. Never fear for the ASUS Maximus VI Hero is here! OK with a name like that I couldn’t resist. The Hero offers the core enthusiast features found in all ROG boards with less fluff.
 
I can vouch for this board. Very solid for me so far. Only thing I wish it had that it doesn't (at this price) is a headphone amp, but I would think anyone who has cans that would truly benefit from an amp would have a proper dedicated sound card.
 
Yep, this board is great, unlike the lemon that the formula is turning out to be.
 
I would like to know more about the I/O testing Dan uses. I'd like to run something similar before migrating my DFI to the new home server.

Are these shipping with C2 stepping yet?
 
Justintoxicated said:
I would like to know more about the I/O testing Dan uses. I'd like to run something similar before migrating my DFI to the new home server.

Are these shipping with C2 stepping yet?
Click to expand...

IO testing is thoroughly explained in the review. Should not be hard to duplicate at all across whatever ports you wanted to use. Just need the off-board hardware to do it with.
 
I have had this board about 3 weeks and it has been flawless. This has been a really nice upgrade from my i7 - 930. I did a clean install with WIN8 and this system runs super smooth.
 
I'm curious about the lan tests. The results are strikingly similar to the results you got when testing the same i217v on the gigabyte z87x-ud3h. In the gigabyte review, you mentioned how poor the benchmarks were, but did not comment on the lan tests for the Asus hero. The cpu usage was much lower on the Asus 1% vs 6% but the actual benchmarks are strikingly similar. Can you elaborate on why you thought the gigabyte board was so poor but did not deem the Asus poor to be equally poor?

Comparison

Asus:The write test averaged 32.09MB/s with an average read of 44.38MB/s. The maximum write speed was 56.50MB/s with the read coming in at 44.90MB/s. On the low side we had 25.24MB/s for the write and 43.21MB/s for the read. CPU usage was a little spiky during the write phase but held around 1% for the duration of the test. The spikes were smaller in the read phase of the test but almost so low as to not register for the bulk of testing. [/B]

Gigabyte:The average write speed for this test was a meager 30.29MB/s with an average read speed of 45.51MB/s. The maximum transfer rates weren’t much better. 46.3MB/s for the write and 46.43MB/s for the read. The minimum transfer rates were even worse with a minimum write speed of 26.09MB/s and 45.00MB/s for the read tests. CPU usage reached 6% in the write phase of the test and fell to 4% during the read phase. [/B]

Your conclusion on the gigabyte review: To summarize I don’t know why the Intel i217v sucks here but it does.
 
Last edited:
The network throughput statistics seem to be suspect and low to me. I have this motherboard, and I can max out the theoretical speed of a gigabit connection (~ 125 MB/s). However this requires hard drives fast enough to both send and receive this speed. From the hard drive benchmarks, we know you have fast enough hard drives. So I can't fathom why your network speed is so slow, other than you not using a large enough file (you said 800 MB), maybe.

I stream gameplay to Twitch and save a local copy of my stream to another computer. Every day I copy that file to my main computer with the Hero motherboard, and I get nearly the maximum theoretical gigabit speeds. I do this nearly daily, and often more than once per day. Each time the file is many gigabytes in size. I go through a gigabit switch, and I don't use jumbo frames or anything like that. I think you need to update your testing methodology.

Another thing glaringly missing from the review is the awesome ram disk application. Its as smooth and easy to use as I could ever imagine such an app to be. The folder synchronization feature is flawless and is an excellent way to see just how fast my SSD really is. You could review this feature on its own merits, then use it to test your SSD and network speeds, because nothing is going to be faster than a ram disk. You just need to populate more ram in there first, 8 GB isn't going to allow a very large ram disk.

Other than these two issues, I found this review to be an accurate assessment of this motherboard. I'm quite happy with my motherboard selection.
 
Actually quite a good board for the money. Sad that Haswell OC is a bit of a hit or miss as most of the Z87 high end and mid end bords look to be packed with features.
 
Haswell is definitely the let-down for our demographic. Even de-lidded they run extremely hot, but since AMD can't compete and the industry is in a panic to switch to mobile use profiles, Intel could care less that the .1% of revenues we give them aren't all that happy with the 'best' they offer on this socket. It's also part of the push to get people to shell out another couple hundred to move to the 2011 socket so they can sell overpriced, cut-down rejected xeons, which is already two chipset generations behind.
 
Sparrow_69 said:
I'm curious about the lan tests. The results are strikingly similar to the results you got when testing the same i217v on the gigabyte z87x-ud3h. In the gigabyte review, you mentioned how poor the benchmarks were, but did not comment on the lan tests for the Asus hero. The cpu usage was much lower on the Asus 1% vs 6% but the actual benchmarks are strikingly similar. Can you elaborate on why you thought the gigabyte board was so poor but did not deem the Asus poor to be equally poor?

Comparison

Asus:The write test averaged 32.09MB/s with an average read of 44.38MB/s. The maximum write speed was 56.50MB/s with the read coming in at 44.90MB/s. On the low side we had 25.24MB/s for the write and 43.21MB/s for the read. CPU usage was a little spiky during the write phase but held around 1% for the duration of the test. The spikes were smaller in the read phase of the test but almost so low as to not register for the bulk of testing. [/B]

Gigabyte:The average write speed for this test was a meager 30.29MB/s with an average read speed of 45.51MB/s. The maximum transfer rates weren’t much better. 46.3MB/s for the write and 46.43MB/s for the read. The minimum transfer rates were even worse with a minimum write speed of 26.09MB/s and 45.00MB/s for the read tests. CPU usage reached 6% in the write phase of the test and fell to 4% during the read phase. [/B]

Your conclusion on the gigabyte review: To summarize I don’t know why the Intel i217v sucks here but it does.
Click to expand...

Indeed there's better software for testing actual transfer speeds wireless speeds, several passes should be done to get any figures. Still I am glad they include these tests!
 
There is simply a point where we can't get any more granular with motherboard testing and get any reviews produced. You can sit here and tell us how we can do better, and surely we can, but when it gets to a point where it takes a month for two people to review a motherboard, it is just not feasible. We produce what we can in a somewhat efficient testing environment and then leave the rest to you the users to comment here in our forums. I would suggest that hands on experiences is as valuable if not more valuable than our experiences.
 
That doesn't explain the lack of comment on bad results in the review, though.
 
Meeho said:
The same as in Gigabyte review:

Replace Gigabyte with Asus.
Click to expand...

Exactly this. This is the part of the review I would have like the reviewers to comment on (since the gigabyte board showed similar results and there was quite a bit said about the ethernet results)
 
1st hero I got was doa, 2nd hasn't been able to run my 4770k stable at stock settings. Hoping its a cpu issue since i'm on the 2nd m/b.
 
Gold reward for a board with a bad sata port? Considering Asus should cherry pick these boards when they give them to top review sites. I understand any board can come faulty but how can you reward laziness like that?
 
Last edited:
The network tool I used was called LAN Speed Test. It was free to try but I think you can unlock stuff if you buy it. It will record averages maximum and minimums etc over a set number of runs.
 
I am running a i920 atm & thinking to upgrade. Do people think its worth it? Also thinking to get the Amd Hawaii if it hits the price/perf sweet spot . Will the mobo/cpu get cheaper by end of October?
 
I only did it for the extra Sata6 connections, pretty much a side-grade from z77.
 
I bought the hero yesterday, and I am not very impressed. I figured the digital readout would be able to display current CPU temp, but it does not. I'm bummed. I'm thinking about going with the Asrock z87 OC Formula.
 
I had a hero board but it ended up being defective. Now I have a Z87-a. While the hero looked much better, they function more or less the same.
 
chadashcroft22 said:
Gold reward for a board with a bad sata port? Considering Asus should cherry pick these boards when they give them to top review sites. I understand any board can come faulty but how can you reward laziness like that?
Click to expand...


...And if you send it back to Asus for RMA they will bend your pins and say it was customer induced damage. I actually owned one of these boards and I liked the look of the board when it lit up. The board has a good VRM on it too and was fun to work with.
 
Octonaut said:
I bought the hero yesterday, and I am not very impressed. I figured the digital readout would be able to display current CPU temp, but it does not. I'm bummed. I'm thinking about going with the Asrock z87 OC Formula.
Click to expand...

What program are you using to try to make the LCD display the temperature? I remember using MBM5 on my epox motherboards to do that back in the day.
 
Rvenger said:
...And if you send it back to Asus for RMA they will bend your pins and say it was customer induced damage. I actually owned one of these boards and I liked the look of the board when it lit up. The board has a good VRM on it too and was fun to work with.
Click to expand...
WOW! That sounds like you had a horrible experience. Sorry!

I'm going to be ordering this shortly and leaves...a slightly sour taste. :( I hope mine's flawless.
 
I was going through the ROG guide for these boards and noticed the Overclocking Profiles item being missing from the Hero. Does it really lack this feature? Even my non ROG P55 board had this option available...
 
Hello,

The Hero seems like the perfect board for my next build, but there is a snag. Apparently it only has an HDMI port, rather than a HDMI and Display, that the Formula has for example.

Being able to run the monitor directly from the motherboard is a good option I would like to have, just in case there is a problem with my GPU card, etc, which has happened in the past.

Currently I have a 4.3 aspect monitor at 1280/1024, and 32 bit color. Can the HDMI port on a Hero work for that setting for 2D applications on the monitor at least? Or would it be necessary to have a display port on the motherboard like the Formula has (for the option of running the display from the MB)?

Thank you for any help.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top