- Oct 1, 2013
- 134
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- 10,690
As we all know a motherboard is one of the main components in a computer without it, you have a box of computer parts ready to sell on eBay. As I recently got an ASUS Crosshair V Formula-z motherboard, the ROG (Republic of Gamers) Edition, I am pleased to announce it lives up to everything its suspposed to.
The box it comes in is excellently presented, it has lid you can lift and see the board through a window of plastic. Moving on to open the box then there are two cases inside, on holds the motherboard itself and some bits of plastic. The other box contains lots of little goodies. With this board you get six brand new SATA cables, which I found extremely useful, It also contained a triple SLI bridge, custom made by ROG. There was also two Crossfire cables for triple setups. There are labels for you SATA cables, I suppose these could be handy if you have more than four installed. Then there's software, manuals and an ASUS sticker, however the best extra has to be the ROG "I'm GAMING DO NOT DISTURB!" door sign.
The board itself looks great, even better when its turned on. Most noticeable on the board the "Start" and "Reset" buttons built on to the board. These are very handy if you are planning on using this board in a test bench situation. There are various features on this board half of which I probably won't take advantage of. Some of the feature that are more performance related include the likes of the "FAST BOOT" switch which, well, does exactly what it says on the tin, it boots fast! There is also a switch at the opposite end of the board entitled "SLOW MODE", don't under estimate this switch. This switch is designed to stabilise overclocks by slowing the speed of the CPU down. That sounds like back rage more than annihilation, but its does help performance personally I won't be using it. There are various other buttons which include "DIRECT KET", this brings you to the BIOS on restart, there is also button to clear your CMOS.
So far I have found that this motherboard is a fantastic board, not going to lie a little steep on the price one of these will set you back a hefty €200 or £175, however for the kit that you get it's worth it! Once installed and configured, before loading the OS I overclocked immediately. Overclocking has been made easy folk. Remember all those different CPU feature you normally had to disable of set up as well as your core speed, multiplier, voltage, etc well this board actually comes with an "Extreme OC" profile pre installed disabling all those feature for you, all I had left to do was set the voltages, multiplier and core speed. So straight out of the box and my FX-8320 was running at 4.4Ghz, when stock speed is 3.5Ghz - 4Ghz(turbo), my testing involves five Prime95 tests followed by Battlefield 4, all was stable and I feel like there's even more room for overclocking it even further.
Graphics cards, especially multi GPU setups will have a field day on this board with is triple SLI/Crossfire-X capability. For Dual card setups PCIe_1 and PCIe_3 run at x16/x16 in triple setups will run at x16/x8/x8. There is one little flaw in the design of the board and that is when running a dual card setup and using the x16/x16 mode, although both cards are very well spaced, the second card which is in PCIe_3 will be very close to your power supply. Obviously this will be variant depending on your particular case, in this instance the case is the Haf-X 932 Full Tower. The power supply as two possible locations, either on the top of the case or the bottom. My preference is bottom because if its at the top, that leaves little or no room for the 200mm fan.
Lastly the board comes with typical features like AI Suite II, GPU Tweak, Web Storage, BIOS Print, CPU-Z (ROG Edition), Extreme Engine Digi+ II, Game First II and ROG Connect. Low Internet latency allows you to frag more, and get fragged less. That's why ROG has introduced GameFirst, a feature that manages the flow of traffic according to your needs so that you can still listen to online music, download and upload files, and engage in Internet chats without sacrificing the low ping times you need to pwn your opponents. The Extreme Engine Digi+ II has been upgraded, while the digital VRM design allows you to achieve ultimate performance with adjustable CPU and memory power management frequencies. ROG Connect allows you to monitor the status of your desktop PC and tweak its parameters in real-time via a notebook, just like a race car engineer.
Over all this board as been built very well and considering it is also the same board that achieved the record core speed of 8.794GHz using the AMD FX-8350 processor it would want to be.
The box it comes in is excellently presented, it has lid you can lift and see the board through a window of plastic. Moving on to open the box then there are two cases inside, on holds the motherboard itself and some bits of plastic. The other box contains lots of little goodies. With this board you get six brand new SATA cables, which I found extremely useful, It also contained a triple SLI bridge, custom made by ROG. There was also two Crossfire cables for triple setups. There are labels for you SATA cables, I suppose these could be handy if you have more than four installed. Then there's software, manuals and an ASUS sticker, however the best extra has to be the ROG "I'm GAMING DO NOT DISTURB!" door sign.
The board itself looks great, even better when its turned on. Most noticeable on the board the "Start" and "Reset" buttons built on to the board. These are very handy if you are planning on using this board in a test bench situation. There are various features on this board half of which I probably won't take advantage of. Some of the feature that are more performance related include the likes of the "FAST BOOT" switch which, well, does exactly what it says on the tin, it boots fast! There is also a switch at the opposite end of the board entitled "SLOW MODE", don't under estimate this switch. This switch is designed to stabilise overclocks by slowing the speed of the CPU down. That sounds like back rage more than annihilation, but its does help performance personally I won't be using it. There are various other buttons which include "DIRECT KET", this brings you to the BIOS on restart, there is also button to clear your CMOS.
So far I have found that this motherboard is a fantastic board, not going to lie a little steep on the price one of these will set you back a hefty €200 or £175, however for the kit that you get it's worth it! Once installed and configured, before loading the OS I overclocked immediately. Overclocking has been made easy folk. Remember all those different CPU feature you normally had to disable of set up as well as your core speed, multiplier, voltage, etc well this board actually comes with an "Extreme OC" profile pre installed disabling all those feature for you, all I had left to do was set the voltages, multiplier and core speed. So straight out of the box and my FX-8320 was running at 4.4Ghz, when stock speed is 3.5Ghz - 4Ghz(turbo), my testing involves five Prime95 tests followed by Battlefield 4, all was stable and I feel like there's even more room for overclocking it even further.
Graphics cards, especially multi GPU setups will have a field day on this board with is triple SLI/Crossfire-X capability. For Dual card setups PCIe_1 and PCIe_3 run at x16/x16 in triple setups will run at x16/x8/x8. There is one little flaw in the design of the board and that is when running a dual card setup and using the x16/x16 mode, although both cards are very well spaced, the second card which is in PCIe_3 will be very close to your power supply. Obviously this will be variant depending on your particular case, in this instance the case is the Haf-X 932 Full Tower. The power supply as two possible locations, either on the top of the case or the bottom. My preference is bottom because if its at the top, that leaves little or no room for the 200mm fan.
Lastly the board comes with typical features like AI Suite II, GPU Tweak, Web Storage, BIOS Print, CPU-Z (ROG Edition), Extreme Engine Digi+ II, Game First II and ROG Connect. Low Internet latency allows you to frag more, and get fragged less. That's why ROG has introduced GameFirst, a feature that manages the flow of traffic according to your needs so that you can still listen to online music, download and upload files, and engage in Internet chats without sacrificing the low ping times you need to pwn your opponents. The Extreme Engine Digi+ II has been upgraded, while the digital VRM design allows you to achieve ultimate performance with adjustable CPU and memory power management frequencies. ROG Connect allows you to monitor the status of your desktop PC and tweak its parameters in real-time via a notebook, just like a race car engineer.
Over all this board as been built very well and considering it is also the same board that achieved the record core speed of 8.794GHz using the AMD FX-8350 processor it would want to be.
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