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

FrgMstr

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ASUS Maximus VI Impact LGA 1150 Motherboard Review - ASUS combines the mini-ITX form factor with Republic of Gamers innovation, style and performance giving rise to the Maximus VI Impact. The tiny motherboards have moved from a tiny computer builder niche to a subset that many true overclocking enthusiasts consider as options now days due to flourishing features sets.
 
Awesome review & board, I'm a big fan of the mini-ITX form factor, and it's nice to see it being stretched.

In the review, where you mention the I/O panel, you have a picture of the PSU connectors, I couldn't find a pic of the I/O panel anywhere.
 
Thanks for covering the audio portion of this board -- I was curious about subjective testing and that part was extremely helpful!
 
A very nice board...too bad it'll be superseded in less than a month. I'm waiting for its successor before I build my NCASE M1 hobby system...;)
 
The days of hulking towers are almost totally behind us for better or for worse. You just don’t usually need that sort of size for a high performance machine.

Mind your tongue young man!

Ah, who are kidding, it's the truth. :(

I think you may be right too, after I hit X99, I may never build an ATX FF again.

Boards like these making us obsolete.
 
Another excellent [H]ard review. Thanks.

I almost bought this board but went with the Asus Z87I-Deluxe instead. I now wish I spend the few extra bucks and bought the Maximus VI Impact.

I found the hardest part of building my mini-ITX system was figuring out which air CPU cooler to use that will fit the board and case. It seems like AIO water coolers don't have a problem, but if you want a quiet AIR cooled system a lot of coolers just won't fit the motherboard and/or case. Especially with the ASUS power riser cards, sound card and memory.

The ZALMAN CNPS8900 Quiet cooler is around a one millimeter from the power riser on my Z87I-Deluxe board and 2mm from my low profile G.Skill Ares memory. Also I'd have to remove the HSF in order to replace the ram.

System is almost silent sitting on my dest two feet from me, even with the two stock Corsair fans in the 250D case.

Thanks again for reviewing mini-ITX boards.
 
Damn, this is a nice looking board, but...

...I must be old and out of touch because I feel like I need a goddamn electrical engineering degree to wade thought that BIOS and all of its settings. :)

Back in my day bitches it was all about (BUS speed)(Multiplier) and maybe a voltage adjustment and that was it! Get off my lawn!
 
Damn, this is a nice looking board, but...

...I must be old and out of touch because I feel like I need a goddamn electrical engineering degree to wade thought that BIOS and all of its settings. :)

Back in my day bitches it was all about (BUS speed)(Multiplier) and maybe a voltage adjustment and that was it! Get off my lawn!

Heh, don't worry, modern Intel OCing seems to only be concerned with multiplier and maybe a voltage adjustment (if that). One less item than you mentioned ;)
 
The board is awesome, I have one paired with an I3 in a fractal node case. Stock cooling all considered it's nice quiet little system, the wifi is extremely good but I am getting BSOD's due to the wifi under Win7. I've been through all the windows mini dumps and all of them point to my wireless causing the bsod probably when waking the system. There's no new drivers for win7 as of 2013. Just an FYI in case anyone runs into this problem.
 
I did a FT03 mini build with one, it's a tiny beast. Asus has the top end m-ITX market on lock-down, nothing else comes close.
 
Nice review and looks like a great board.:D

I just built a system based on the Gigabyte GA- H87N-WiFi and the features of the board for the size are just amazing.
 
On the ROG forums there have been problems noted with the clock on Maximus VI boards. I'm still looking for a fix to my Hero, those suggested have yet to do the trick.

Haven't seen any mention of it in HardOCP reviews (could have missed it) so I assume you've not seen the problem?
 
The board is awesome, I have one paired with an I3 in a fractal node case. Stock cooling all considered it's nice quiet little system, the wifi is extremely good but I am getting BSOD's due to the wifi under Win7. I've been through all the windows mini dumps and all of them point to my wireless causing the bsod probably when waking the system. There's no new drivers for win7 as of 2013. Just an FYI in case anyone runs into this problem.

Sounds like typical ASUS bullshit. ASUS makes amazing hardware, but they absolutely suck at update drivers (or even just providing the latest driver).
 
DPC latency varies from board model to model and brand to brand. DPC issues show up in the form of audio dropouts and streaming video issues. Naturally this is something that the enthusiast would want to avoid. Fortunately there is a nice tool for checking this which doesn’t even require and installer. I used the DPC Latency Checker and let it run for 10 minutes to graph the results.

Bummer the link gave me a 404 error but thanks for the heads up. I found several downloadable DPC checkers. Nice article on an interesting board. :)
 
Damn, this is a nice looking board, but...

...I must be old and out of touch because I feel like I need a goddamn electrical engineering degree to wade thought that BIOS and all of its settings. :)

Back in my day bitches it was all about (BUS speed)(Multiplier) and maybe a voltage adjustment and that was it! Get off my lawn!

There are allot of settings to adjust but the truth is that you won't need very many of them to get a good overclock. Some of those settings might allow you to edge out a little more than you'd get by adjusting the main two or three settings you need to play with but the gains probably won't be huge.
 
On the ROG forums there have been problems noted with the clock on Maximus VI boards. I'm still looking for a fix to my Hero, those suggested have yet to do the trick.

Haven't seen any mention of it in HardOCP reviews (could have missed it) so I assume you've not seen the problem?

What issues with the clock? I have no clue what you are talking about. So I guess that answers your question. ;)
 
I have the Maximus Impact and I'm seeing some peculiar behavior that maybe you guys could shed some light on.

It seems that my voltages stick to some particular values like so:
My vcore does not get set to whatever I set it to in the Bios, depending on how low or high I go, it jumps from 1.248 to 1.264, to 1.280, to 1.296. So if I set it somewhere in between, it will simply go to one of these Vcores depending on what my chosen number is closest to. This is reflected in the BIOS and within Windows.

Is this normal operation for Z87 / Haswell, or this motherboard even?
 
I have the Maximus Impact and I'm seeing some peculiar behavior that maybe you guys could shed some light on.

It seems that my voltages stick to some particular values like so:
My vcore does not get set to whatever I set it to in the Bios, depending on how low or high I go, it jumps from 1.248 to 1.264, to 1.280, to 1.296. So if I set it somewhere in between, it will simply go to one of these Vcores depending on what my chosen number is closest to. This is reflected in the BIOS and within Windows.

Is this normal operation for Z87 / Haswell, or this motherboard even?

Depends on the nearest VID code and the internal FIVR LLC. UEFI simply programs VID to the internal FIVR - which determines what the actual voltage will be.
 
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I did a FT03 mini build with one, it's a tiny beast. Asus has the top end m-ITX market on lock-down, nothing else comes close.

Yeah I was daydreaming on Newegg last week thinking of doing the same pairing. I have a uATX build from 2011 with the regular FT03 and I haven't seen any new cases in the past 2.5 years that look cooler to me.

The only problem with that FT03 mini is that it says the max GPU length is 10". Aren't the high end NVIDIA cards pushing 10.5" now?

mITX looks like it's really arrived with this ASUS board. SLI doesn't interest me and sound cards are going the way of the dodo for gaming and casual music listening.

Motherboards have really eaten up a lot of discrete parts over the last 13 years I've been buildings PCs. Ethernet cards (and WiFi), extra USB port cards, sound cards, even GPUs if you don't need to game much.
 
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