Date: October 22, 2007 - Author: Rob Williams
We took a look at the Blitz Formula and Extreme boards from ASUS just over two months ago, and now we have the X38 version of those boards on the bench today. In addition to featuring a Northbridge waterblock, it also has "extreme" overclocking ability and a great bundle.
With Intel's X38 launch just a few weeks ago, supported motherboards have been popping up all over the place, including five from ASUS alone. We've already taken a look at Gigabyte's GA-X38-DQ6 and will also be taking a deeper look at ASUS' own P5E3 next week, but for now we are going to focus on their highest-end offering, the Maximus Formula Special Edition.
Being a part of ASUS' own Republic of Gamers series, we know that this board should serve its purpose of being a superb gaming motherboard and also one that caters directly to enthusiast overclockers. Later, we will be taking a look at the BIOS, where that fact will become even more obvious, thanks to tight tweaking ability and generous voltage possibilities.
Whereas the Blitz Formula and Blitz Extreme P35-based boards were both considered to be "Special Edition's", the Maximus Formula will also be offered in a non-Special Edition version. The difference is that the Special Edition includes a Northbridge waterblock, just like the Blitz boards did. The non-Special Edition instead relies on a larger heatsink. If you have no desire to overclock the Northbridge, there is no sense to pay extra for the Special Edition.
Like all X38 boards, the Maximus Formula supports 45nm processors that are due out in a few weeks, in addition to FSB1333 support. Some motherboards, this one included, also support 1600FSB processors, though they will not be available until early 2008. What X38 also brings to the table is 16x Crossfire support, but we will be unable to test this due to lack of available ATI cards.
Because this is a RoG board, ASUS packs in the bling and makes sure enthusiasts are satisfied. Aside from the extreme BIOS options, an LED BIOS poster is included as well as 3DMark 2006 and also a copy of STALKER, a game that ASUS has been proud to sponsor.
The Maximus has identical packaging to what we saw with the Blitz. The difference of course is the features list and the name. Everything else is quite similar.
Many of the extras have been covered already, but in the picture below you can see the various cables, water loop supplies (including 1/2" to 3/8" converters) and also a small fan that can be clipped on a portion of the heatsink for even greater cooling ability.
Continue onto the next page for a trip around the board itself.
Chances are, when you first take a look at the Maximus, the first thing your eyes will be drawn to is the elaborate heatsink, which is comprised of both copper and aluminum, though the latter is primarily above the PWM area.
I appreciate the abundance of fan connectors, which include three towards the bottom and three on the top half. The side S-ATA ports wil also be welcomed by those who want to keep their case as tidy as possible.
There is only one design-related feature that I found tedious to work around. The left portion of the waterblock is tight... I had trouble installing tubing there and successfully securing the clip to the left barb. Better spacing between the waterblock and the rest of the heatsink would have been appreciated.
The slot layout may seem a little odd, but it works. There are two PCI, two PCI-E 16x and three PCI-E 1x (though the absolute top one designed for the included sound card is not pictured). If you have two large GPUs installed,. the slots directly below each PCI-E 16x slot might be blocked.
Moving rightward, we can see the Southbridge and its simple heatsink and also the USB connectors, onboard power/reset switches and the side-mounted SATA ports. Two fan connectors are located here as well.
The Fusion waterblock is a rather simple affair, but it's more than capable of keeping the Northbridge cool. The barbs are 3/8" sized, but if you are using a 1/2" setup, converters are included.
The Formula is a DDR2 board, while the Extreme is a DDR3 board, although the release of that model hasn't been announced yet. There's another fan connector to the right of the DIMM slots, which comes in handy for those RAM coolers, such as Corsairs Dominator Airflow.
Here is a better view of the entire heatsink setup. It's one of the most elaborate I've seen on any motherboard, which is a good thing. Even without water, the boards heatsink will help keep temperatures at reasonable levels. The entire heatsink is copper based, with the aluminum portion being located right atop it.
Lastly, the back panel includes six USB ports, SPDIF optical, firewire, Clear CMOS (does as you'd expect) and also a PS/2 Keyboard port. Not pictured is the separate sound card that ASUS includes with their Blitz and Maximus boards, which will use the top PCI-E 1x port.
Before we report on performance, we will first go through the BIOS and see what the Maximus is capable of. As we find out... it's more capable than most will ever need it to be.
Where an enthusiast motherboard is concerned, the BIOS is one of the more important aspects, one that can make or break the overclocking ability. Luckily for us, ASUS never fails to go completely overboard with their higher-end boards, and the Maximus Formula is no different. Before we take a look at the overclocking-specific options, let's first take a quick stroll through the other portions of the BIOS.
The opening BIOS screen features the usual slew of options you'd expect, from date and time to installed hard-drives. To view quick system information (eg: to see if you have the correct CPU installed), you can go into the System Information section at the bottom.
The Maximus Formula wastes no time getting into the options that overclockers are after. At default, all options will be set to auto, with the FSB Frequency being set to the appropriate setting, depending on the installed processor. The top portion of this section is dedicated to CPU and DRAM clocks, in addition to your FSB strap, which I found no benefit in touching on this board.
Scrolling down the page, you will quickly reveal all of the various memory timing options that are available. Though I love to overclock memory, I admit that I have no desire to get that tweak-happy. But if your goal is having your memory operate at it's absolute best, you could easily spend hours, or days, on these options alone.
Moving even lower reveals all of the various voltage options, of which there are many. If you read our Blitz Extreme and Formula review in late July, you saw just how ridiculous the voltage options were. The Maximus Formula takes things to an even higher level:
If you manage to not kill your computer with the insane voltage options, you can also configure the on-board LEDs, which are color-coded depending on how asinine your selected voltage is.
Here are a few more BIOS shots that most here should already be well familiar with:
The Power section is one of the best I've seen with temperature listings for the CPU, MB, NB and SB... quick and useful information. I referred to this page after each reboot if I increased the voltage, to make sure temperatures were still in check.
Moving to the bottom of this page is even more useful, as it reports the real voltage that's being sent off to each component. I always found that the NB voltage here was higher than what was actually set, so it's wise to check here after each reboot for that reason. You don't want to go overboard by accident.
The last BIOS feature worth mentioning is one that I wish all motherboards included... the ability to flash your BIOS from within the BIOS using a thumb drive or some other FAT32 partition. It makes things easy. You download the latest BIOS, copy it to your thumb drive, reboot into the BIOS and minutes later you are using the latest version.
As far as enthusiasts are concerned, there is nothing lacking in this BIOS at all... and if there is, it is likely to be a feature that the absolute few would be interested in. Next we will tackle our testing methodology and jump right into our testing results.
Throughout all of our benchmarks regardless of what we are reviewing, testing is done in a clean and stand-alone version of Windows XP Professional with SP2. The exception is SYSmark 2007 Preview and PCMark Vantage, which are tested under Windows Vista. Prior to testing, these conditions are met:
The testing rig used for today's benchmarking is as follows:
Please note that for our DDR3 motherboards, we use DDR3-1333 speeds with 7-7-7-20 timings, and for our DDR2 boards we use DDR2-1066 5-5-5-15. Also, due to Intel's 45nm being right around the corner, we decided to use only three motherboards for our testing today, as we plan to make the QX9650 our primary testing processor once released.
SYSmark is an industry leading system benchmarking tool, which is completely automated but utilizes real-world tests. It installs common applications such as Microsoft Word and Excel, Photoshop CS2, 3DS Max, SketchUp! among others.
SYSmark grades the performance of the system by how well it could handle different operations. Systems with more than one core will benefit in the tests, since there is a lot of multi-tasking throughout. Once the test is completed, it will provide you with an overall score, in addition to showing areas where the computer excelled.
Although by a very small margin, the Formula fell slightly behind the other X38 boards.
Interestingly, the board fell behind the other two in all tests except for the VideoCreation. Next up are our Futuremark runs, including the new PCMark Vantage.
Futuremark has long offered benchmarking tools to enthusiasts that allow them to gage their systems worth. There is a lot of skepticism revolving around the importance of the overall scores, but we enjoy running them because it's a quick fix to see differences between platforms. Real world benchmarks are by far more important, and we will cover those on the next few pages.
3D Mark 2006 tests your system in a similar manner that 01, 03 and 05 do, except this updated version actually does bottleneck on your GPU. The faster the GPU, the better the score. Multi-core processors also help greatly improve your scores here.
I'm impressed that the difference between each board is so tight, a good thing, really. 3DMark was run twice on each board, so the above scores are the result of the two.
Futuremark recently launched their latest PCMark version, called Vantage. It's not a simple upgrade, but rather a completely revamped benchmark that competes with the likes of SYSmark 2007. The good thing about Vantage though, is that I don't have to put up with random errors and have to start the test over, like I do with SYSmark.
PCMark Vantage consists of eight different scores, with PCMark Suite being the primary. All of the secondary results are included here as well, though, to get a better idea of which board excels where.
Finally, the Maximus Formula is beginning to show it's true colors, beating out the other boards by 300 points overall.
Nothing can prove the performance of a PC better than real-world benchmarks. The only downside to real-world tests is that it's difficult to compare to a friends computer, unless they happen to have the same software and media files that you are encoding/converting. We can show direct differences though, since we run the exact same tests on each board.
To test video encoding capabilities, we ripped our "Lamb of God - Killadelphia" concert DVD and then used Nero Recode to convert it into something that can be burned on a normal sized DVD. The direct DVD rip is 7.7GB, and Recode compresses it into a 4.5GB frame.
A matter of 2 seconds doesn't mean too much, but the robust P5E3 still reigned supreme.
3D Model rendering is a big business, so a capable processor and motherboard is required to have rendering completed on time. Cinebench R10 is a recent update to Cinebench 9, which renders a high-resolution motorcycle. It scales well with extra cores and higher frequencies, so it's a benchmark we'd hate to be without.
It's not too surprising to see such close scores here, as it's more the CPU that is the important factor. Each board also selects slightly different FSB speeds as well (despite 333MHz being chosen), so those few extra megahertz might play a role in achieving a higher overall score.
Different motherboards use different chipsets for SATA controllers, so these tests are a good way to see how one board will compare to another. The first test is synthetic, using HD Tach RW/3, while the File Compression is real world, which involves compressing a 4GB folder (4,809 files) using 7-Zip.
Once again, the varying differences are quite minimal, which is a good thing overall. It seems no matter which board of the three you choose, you will have fairly equal performance all around the board [no pun]. Of course, gaming is the deciding factor for some, so we will be jumping into that next.
To pit these boards against some popular games, we chose to use Half-Life 2: Episode Two, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Need for Speed: Carbon. Each game offers its own flare to our benchmarking reviews for different reasons. HL2 is great simply because it's one of the most popular games of all time, while STALKER has a wide open world to render and AI to churn. NFS: Carbon is included because racing games really enjoy powerful systems to push high FPS when you are driving at 200MPH.
As a reminder, we are running a 3.0GHz Intel QX6850 along with an ASUS 8800GTX, which we choose because of its power and ability to rid out the GPU as being a bottleneck. All of the games were run on 1280x1024 using default settings, in addition to 2560x1600 (1600x1200 for NFS) with maxed out settings and reasonable AA. Results were tabulated with the help of FRAPS 2.9.2. Each play through lasted between three and five minutes, depending on the level chosen.
For Half-Life 2: Episode Two, I will be using a saved game that takes place near the end of the game, the Silo mission. Each playthrough lasts about five minutes and varies very slightly. This is a great mission to use because it has a ton of action, lots of AI and you get to knock Striders down!
In S.T.A.L.K.E.R., I chose a run-through with the thumb drive mission, which occurs near the beginning of the game. Through it, there are many people who die and you get to leave with a thumb drive. Does it get much better?
In our NFS: Carbon test, we played through the first normal race when choosing one through the Quick Race mode. Two choices of car are given, an upcoming Chevrolet Camaro and a Koenigsegg CCX. I think it's obvious which one I chose.
We'll wrap the review up with overclocking and our final thoughts on the next page.
Most motherboards will handle overclocking to some degree, but the Maximus Formula is a board that caters directly to the enthusiast crowd, so we should be able to expect one of the best experiences available. Luckily, we were not disappointed.
I didn't delve too much into the water-cooling aspect of the Maximus, but it's the method I used during all testing. As seen in our performance results, water-cooling the NB will not drastically improve scores, but does help temperatures all around. If you want a deeper look at water-cooling the board, you can read a page from our Blitz Formula review. That board's water-cooling process and results are identical to this one.
I do highly recommend, however, using water on the Northbridge if you care about overall system temperatures, even if it won't improve an overclock. At one setting, the NB had hit 53°C without the water, but once plugged in, it dropped straight to 36°C, which I consider to be a huge decrease.
Don't fall into the belief that adding water to the Northbridge only helps the Northbridge, because that's not true at all. It helps bring the overall CPU temperature down (in my case it was close to 4°C on a high-voltage Quad-Core overclock) and it will also bring ambient temperatures down. For a smooth, cool-running machine, it's a great addition.
As far as Quad-Core overclocking goes, we managed to amp up the FSB to 470MHz with 1.73v on the Northbridge. This is a hefty amount, but temperatures were well within reason. This is the highest I've been able to go FSB-wise with this processor on any board.
Moving on over to a dual-core processor, our E6750, the FSB was bumped up to 490FSB using the same voltage.
While we didn't hit the magic 500, the overclocks we did achieve can't be scoffed at.
The Maximus Formula is another great offering from ASUS that comes recommended. Though, it's still not for everyone. At $280USD, it's going to appeal to either hardcore overclockers or those who don't mind spending extra money on quality equipment.
Besides the board itself, you will find yourself with a copy of STALKER and 3DMark 2006, in addition to other random bling such as the LED BIOS poster that sits atop your PC. As far as I am aware, the Formula is still the only motherboard on the market with a built-in Northbridge waterblock, which is one of the largest benefits of the board. Even though it didn't help us achieve a higher FSB overclock, seeing lower temperatures around the entire system was fantastic.
At this point in time, all X38-based motherboards I've seen are expensive, with the Maximus Formula being one of the least expensive. Yes, seriously. The feature-rich P5E3 Deluxe board sits at $350 at popular e-tailers, making it even more exclusive. It's a great board as well. Though I haven't managed to overclock it as high as the Maximus (yet), it features many more additions that would better please casual computer users, thanks to it's n-based WiFi card and ExpressGate on-board Linux.
After taking all things into consideration, I am awarding this board an 8 out of 10 along with our Editor's Choice. This is the same rating I gave the Blitz boards back in July, and really, the Maximus is not that much different... it's the Blitz with X38 perks. If you don't require the X38 bonuses but can find a Blitz Formula for much cheaper (although I am finding them difficult to track down), you might want to save the premium and go with it instead.
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