ASUS Maximus Formula Special Edition

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.