ASUS Maximus Formula @ [H]

I just purchased this board and am totally confused by the many BIOS options...I'm primarily a high end gamer and want to run my system at stock for the time being (no overclocking)...is there a listing someplace of optimal BIOS settings for this board?...Thanks
 
I think he means optimal performance settings. Normally the default bios is not tweaked for max performance. I too am curious what some of the settings mean, and what they should be set to for max performance and or stability.
 
hows the onboard sound on this mobo anyways?

i have an Audigy SE leftover from a previous build and im debating weather or not to use it on a Maximus Formula
 
Hooligan said:
hows the onboard sound on this mobo anyways?

i have an Audigy SE leftover from a previous build and im debating weather or not to use it on a Maximus Formula
Click to expand...

It is decent. The onboard audio is no Creative X-Fi though.
 
I'd really like to know how that compares to the Auzentech. The audio on X-Fi Elite Pro occasionally has an odd pop here and there when gaming. COD4 comes to mind. I've gotten used to it's precise and accurate rendering especially when EAX is used properly like F.E.A.R. Combat. It's almost cheating. :D

I wonder how the supremeFX compares in sound quality for at least non gaming tasks like music, movies...
 
Hi,
I plan on picking up this MB today along with the Q6600 at Microcenter and before I do, I just wanted to know what's the latest revision for the MB is.

Could someone please tell me what's the latest revision and if this information is posted on the outside of the box?

I already know what stepping to look for on the 6600, just need to know what to look for on the MB.

Thanks!
 
JimmyNeutron said:
Hi,
I plan on picking up this MB today along with the Q6600 at Microcenter and before I do, I just wanted to know what's the latest revision for the MB is.

Could someone please tell me what's the latest revision and if this information is posted on the outside of the box?

I already know what stepping to look for on the 6600, just need to know what to look for on the MB.

Thanks!
Click to expand...

There are no revision changes to the Maximus Formula. They are all the same except for the SE version which has a different heatpipe cooling system that doubles as a water block.
 
Just wanted to chime in and say I have this board running an E8400 at 450 x 9 stable. I really like this board.
 
Mad_CatMk2 said:
I thought x38 doesn't do crossfireX? Or is it both x38 and x48...
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X38 and X48 should both do Crossfire-X as does 5400. Though the drivers may or may not currently support more than 2 GPUs on a given Intel chipset based board right now.
 
Alright.

And, given that most people use WinXP (do they?), we can't even use more than 2 gpus...boo.

Maybe I'll give Vista a chance sometime later this year lol.
 
Ok I think I have an issue with my Maximus Formula , but not sure. Speedfan gives me some really messed up voltages as does the bios for the 12v , and 5v rails. I am running the following system:
Q6600
Asus MAximus Formula
8gig Corsair DDR
3870x2
PCPC crossfire Edition 750w
Vista Ultimate x64

now speed fan, OCCT, BIOS, and Sandra reports my 12v as 11.18v and my 5v as 3.3v. I have not installed the EPU driver for this motherboard and when I check the 12v and 5v rails from a molex with a volt meter it is:
12v idle: 12.05v
12v load 12.04v
5v idle 5.02v
5v load 5.01v

Are there any points on the mother board that I can take a reading with the volt meter? I do not want to kill any of my shiney new hardware. It is 100% stable at stock and 100% stable at 3.6Ghz as well. So I know my PSU is spot on with the 12v and 5v and the LED indicators on the mobo all show green. Is this just a case of inaccurate reporting programs like how I had to add a 15 degree offset for each core in speedfan? If the voltages where really off by that much this thing should be crashing all the time, right?
 
Yeah... if the system is running fine and the volt meter is giving you those readings, I wouldn't worry about it - it's just the software screwing up.
 
I installed the Maximus Formula board the other day and the Chassis Fan 3 temp readout in my BIOS is a bright red color while all the other Chassis and Opt Fan readings are all a normal blue color...the Chassis Fan 3 is spinning at 1300rpm so it looks to be working OK but I'm just worried about why the color is red...red usually equals a danger sign of some kind...anyone have any ideas?
 
chassis fan 3 TEMP? did you buy the optional temp sensors? if not, that's probably why. run the fan on ratio instead of by temp unless you did buy the temp sensors
 
just got my maximus and installed it with a E8400, running great now..

ill tell ya if you got a bad stick of ram this mobo will sure make sure you know it, had a problem with some Crucial tracers, 2x1 1066, it didnt like one of the sticks so i had to pull one of my sticks out and test them one at a time, thought it was the overvolting problem at first but it wasnt, seems like one of the sticks was bad and i didnt know it.. was the root of instability in the system, its a good thing i had 2 more sticks of tracers on the way {due to arrive tommorrow}.

as far as everything else goes temps seem fine on NB and SB low 40's high 30's,

the only other problem i have is with the FXII sound card the one that goes into the black slot, it will be picked up by the system but it will not work no matter what i try, i send it to the drivers on disk and downloaded and it will not allow it to work,
now i know it is supposed to be the smbus but i cannot seem to get XP to accept anything for drivers for it, if anyone can send me specifics on where the driver is on disk or post it on here please do as i cant get it to work. lucky me i got a Xfi Gamer Pro inbound from ZZF too.... another day no sound no biggie......

overall the motherboard is really nice and really good i Seem to have gotten one of the newest ones as this one shipped from factory with 0907 bios minor glitches but one heck of a motherboard... once you get it stable it is like a rock and well worth it .. Phil Willson
 
yeah i'd ditch the supreme fx anyway. if you look up reviews on the maximus formula and where they did testing on the sound. it didnt do too well. i got the xi-fi xtreme fatality pro myself. good luck with your system!
 
I haven't used XP in a while but the supplied sound card works fine in Vista. I run it along with my X-Fi and use it for Vent and skype mostly but I noticed no issues with it if used for gaming too. I saw two sound driver packages on Asus' website but I downloaded and used the larger one -one is 15 and the other 58mb- though i'm not sure what the difference is. gl
 
well i found out it was a XP SP3 glitch they had a kb fix out for it.. so i got it working,, personally the Xfi Gamer is going in.. the only thing i might keep the SFX II card in the system for is the perty lights and nice finish on it... shows up good..... Phil
 
I did notice some USB issues that I did not experience under vista on my older Abit AT8 32x. Most of my USB device worked but they did not always get recognized as USB 2.0 even when they are actually USB 2.0 devices, and my webcam didn't work at all. I then found this and USB is 100% better. I know it is a Vista issue and not a Maximus Formula issue but I never ran into this issue until I switched to this motherboard. Also, from my previous post about the voltage reading way off, I installed the AI suite and Asus probe and they seem to read in the correct range. Also after installing those Asus programs speedfan and OCCT appear to be reporting the correct voltages as well. I guess I installed the EPU driver unknowingly.
 
I got rid of my maximus formula, it refused to work with my PC2 8500 ram. I eneded up trading it in for a ABIT IP35 pro.

I have no idea why but the formula just doesn;t work right with 8000 and 8500 ram, it downclocked it to 800mhz and when i tried to up it again, even to 900mhz I would get system instability and crashes. And yes I had the proper voltages set and the newest bios.
 
Ragenrok said:
I got rid of my maximus formula, it refused to work with my PC2 8500 ram. I eneded up trading it in for a ABIT IP35 pro.

I have no idea why but the formula just doesn;t work right with 8000 and 8500 ram, it downclocked it to 800mhz and when i tried to up it again, even to 900mhz I would get system instability and crashes. And yes I had the proper voltages set and the newest bios.
Click to expand...

Were you using 2GB sticks by any chance? I have the same issue where I cant run my ram at anything over 850MHz. Even at stock fsb I cannot run mine at anything close to what they are supposed to run at.
However, I found a new unreleased bios -1003- that has allowed me to go all the way up to 1066MHz with all four sticks. There is a bad part to this tho and that is that I cannot change my cpu multi. I have a feeling that my ram is what was holding my fsb at a measly 425MHz and i cannot wait to get this version with working multis. I've been running it the last few days at 380fsb (the max my cpu can do with the 9 multi) and ram at 1010MHz with zero issues.
Hope your new board treats you better as it one of the best out there.
 
I was only using two 1gig sticks, ya this ABIT IP35 Pro has been awsome so far, I plan on spedning a night here pretty soon fine tunning my memoery and CPU overclocks lol.
 
WtBadAss said:
I then found this and USB is 100% better.
Click to expand...
I wonder if that's all wrapped up in SP1...

IP35 Pro was a great board for me. G.Skill 2x2GB PC8000 running per spec wo/ issue here. Also, my EPU chills w/ a ! in dev mgr. :D
 
has anyone got a fix for the cold boot issue??/
i didnt have it till this morning but it seems to hang right after usb initialization...i thought 0907 bios fixed all that...... anyone?? Phil
 
oh yea a link to a pics of my rig... forgot to add that http://gallery.filefront.com/willip90/ tell me what ya think

E8400
Dtek Fuzion WB/ with Washer installed
PA 120.2 Rad.
Eheim 1250 pump
Asus Maximus Formula/Non SE
Raptor X 150gig hd
3 gigs Crucial 1066 DDR2
Xfi XtremeGamer pro Fatatality
Evga 9600 GT
Wireless N
 
Ragenrok said:
I was only using two 1gig sticks, ya this ABIT IP35 Pro has been awsome so far, I plan on spedning a night here pretty soon fine tunning my memoery and CPU overclocks lol.
Click to expand...

Probably didn't like them for some reason. Although I wouldn't expect that with 1GB sticks the board seems very picky -at least compared to the P35. Good luck with the OC and let us know how it turns out. The abit is a GREAT oc'er.


willip90 said:
has anyone got a fix for the cold boot issue??/
i didnt have it till this morning but it seems to hang right after usb initialization...i thought 0907 bios fixed all that...... anyone?? Phil
Click to expand...

I haven't had any cold boot issues since the updating to the 0907 bios. Does the LCD poster give any info? Also you can try your usb devices one by one to see if you can pinpoint the trouble maker.
Nice looking rig too, good job with the wires and such. Very clean:)
 
I've recently started to have some trouble with this board.

From time to time my computer will just outright crash, I'll reboot and get stuck on DET DRAM during post. Clearing CMOS doesn't fix it, removing power + battery doesn't fix it either. I eventually have to remove my RAM, put in my old RAM, set timings manually again, save, put RAM back in and it works.

Let's just say that's really bloody annoying :(
 
yea i think my problem is like yours cept mine is countmem on the little lcd comming up right after the usb initilization .... i have to keep tapping a key on my usb keyboard and reset it till it goes... dont know why it would do that but it seems to get it out of the glitch for some reason....... any one got ideas on the subject? phil
 
Last weekend I finally built my PC and all week I have been trouble shooting and trying to figure out what is causing my entire system to stutter. I am running XP x64 edition.

Roughly every other second like clock work the entire PC will stutter and seize for a few milliseconds. This makes anything with audio and moving visuals on the screen a major pain to deal with. Even simply dragging a small window across the screen, or simply the mouse pointer exhibits this behavior.

I've tried stock speeds and settings on everything, over clocking and manually setting front side bus, Memory speeds, PCI Express clocks, enabling bios settings, disabling bios settings, legacy USB support disabled, new drivers, old drivers, etc. Still stuttering. I tried on board sound, audigy ZS PCI card as well.

One thing that gave me hope was booting into windows with absolutely no nvidia drivers installed, I booted into safe mode and used driver cleaner, then when I went back into windows sound would play fine without stuttering, but I had no video card to use because of no drivers. So no gaming and no higher than 800x600 resolution.

I think potentially the issue is with IRQs, when I check in the device manager IRQ16 has my video card, a hard drive controller, and a USB controller and possibly something else random in there. Is there a way in bios to specify IRQs? Or is that something done in the OS itself?

Anyone else encounter consistent stuttering on this board? If so, how did you fix it?
 
I had a jerkiness in windows when I had my memory overclocked to 961mhz but I dropped it back to 800. In both cases my CPU was o/c'd to 3.6Ghz using the 333 FSB strap. I imagine alot of that is due to having a full 8gb of memory installed. I probably could have upped the voltage to the northbridge or adjusted the bank timing to elimate the stutter, but performace is more than sufficiant. Doesn't sound like memory is your problem since you metioned it happening at stock, but it might help someone.
 
I took 1003 off , Had too many problems with it only stable multiplier I could work with was x10... everything else wouldnt even post. even if I underclocked. Moved back to 0907 and had no problems at all. Seems these boards are having alot of random issues across the board. overall im satisfied. board recognized my 8500c5's jsut fine im running 4x1. has no problem taking my q6700 to 3.8. im pretty satisfied, This board isnt for the faint of heart and requires some tweaking if you want to O.C. I had a especially hard time since there arent many people out ther running q6700's. but alot of little tweaks I learned just from reading post after post got me up and running pretty nicely. Now lets hope for a more stable updated bios.
 
DrNick said:
Probably didn't like them for some reason. Although I wouldn't expect that with 1GB sticks the board seems very picky -at least compared to the P35. Good luck with the OC and let us know how it turns out. The abit is a GREAT oc'er.
Click to expand...

Ya, I first got my ram to stock speeds and ram memtest to make sure it wasn;t my ram and it wasn't. Right now im just running my e8400 at 450x9 for a 4.05ghz OC and running my ram at 1:1

I can't get my CPU to go any higher than 4.05ghz wihtout going above 1.4V and I really don't want to bring it any higher than that.
 
I got this board in a few days ago and I'm running into a big issue.

On my P5K-E I could run 3200mhz for 24hours in P95 yet with Maximus the computer reboots during Prime. I'm using the same settings as my P5K so I'm stumped... (voltages adjusted so they would be the same after vdroop/overvolt)

Temps are good as well... below 60C on the CPU.

I'm wondering if it is the NB causing this. What is the optimal chipset voltage for a 400FSB?

EDIT: I've lowered the speed of the memory, CPU, and FSB yet I still get BSOD during Prime. Load temps are about 47C for the CPU and NB. This CPU as well as the memory were rock solid with my last mobo. This is an issue with the Maximus... I just need to figure out if it's faulty now.
 
and while I wasn't having troubles like or as bad as you are experiencing I couldn't get my E8400 to go over 3.7 gig. This 3.7 gig was all I could do on my old board (A Gigabyte P965 DS3L) so I was somewhat disappointed. Then I read Anandtech's write up on how to set the bios up for overclocking for this board and wow... I'm now running the e8400 at 4.01 gig for the past week with no problems. It can't be overly difficult as I'm somewhat of a noob to all this. I've only run othos for an overnight session and didn't have any problems. I am having to push 1.39 volts to the cpu but its running cool with my cooler that I have. The system hasn't crashed since setting up the bios from Anandtech directions....whether running games or arcview based software for my business.

I'd give you a link but for the life of me don't know how to do that...

Good luck...keep trying
 
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