Asus Maximus VII Gene Review

Overclocking

As Intel's Devil's Canyon CPUs, namely the Core i5-4690K and Core i7-4790K were launched some time after Z97 motherboards hit the shelves, we've used our standard LGA1150 test CPU, the Core i7-4770K to offer up comparison numbers to previous motherboards we've tested.

However, we can confirm that the Maximus VII Gene hit 4.8GHz fairly easily with our Devil's Canyon duo. With our Core i7-4770K, the Maximus VII Gene also hit 4.8GHz, although it needed 1.3V to get there.

This is quite a bit higher than most other Z97 boards we've seen, but it was bang on the money with the more recent CPUs, needing a fairly standard 1.33V to be completely stable at 4.8GHz, which we've needed on other boards too.

UEFI

We have few complaints about Asus' ROG UEFI's, although a little niggle with the Maximus VII Gene is its complexity. There's an absolute mass of options, especially for overclocking, and some of these are spread over various pages. That said, you can just dump the ones you'll be using regularly into the My Favourites section, so we can't really hold anything against Asus here.






as with many enthusiast-orientated motherboards these days, there's slightly more than simple slow/medium/high fan speeds on offer. You can tweak the fan response curve too and for all the system fans - not just the CPU fan.


ROG SSD Secure Erase is easy to use and a handy addition to the UEFI. If you're reinstalling Windows, then secure-erasing your OS SSD can be tricky if you don't have another PC to do it from.





Head over the page to see the Performance Analysis and Conclusion