Maximus VI Formula Firmware
The Maximus VI Formula’s Extreme Tweaker menu has a few more features compared to non-ROG products, yet it will appear familiar to owners of other recent Asus motherboards. The top of the menu still starts off with clock controls and descends into voltage levels.
You’ll notice that the board doesn't quite push the expected 4.6 GHz from this CPU sample, and that’s because of a heat issue. Our Core i7-4770K doesn’t work well at 100% loads in AVX-optimized software if voltage signficantly exceeds 1.25 V, and we had to drop the core setting to 1.23 V to reach that goal. Voltage under load climbs to around 1.268 V, compared to ASRock’s 1.269 V, hence the small frequency difference. Any additional voltage bump on our end induced a thermal-throttling 1.27x maximum.
The Maximus VI Formula includes a wide array of preconfigured overclocking profiles, including some that cause parts of the board to get clocked down to facilitate significantly increased BCLK frequencies.
The Maximus VI Formula features full primary, secondary, and tertiary DRAM timing controls, along with wave detection and skew controls.
For those who don’t have the time to optimize a DRAM overclock, Asus provides several pages of detailed memory overclocking profiles that cover a wide range of popular ICs.
Digi+ Power provides voltage sag reduction and current limit controls.
Exclusive to Asus' ROG-series motherboards, Tweaker’s Paradise provides even more advanced wave form and voltage control.