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ROGBot
The Maximus VI Formula should be available to purchase in a few weeks. A motherboard many have been waiting for, and for good reason. Plenty of cool features on offer, we won't go into them all, but have picked out some of the salient ones for you to check out below:
Board layout and features at a glance:
Gaming Features
SupremeFX
The Maximus VI Formula sports a specialized audio solution called SupremeFX. Based on Realtek’s latest ALC1150 chipset, the Cirrus Logic DAC and the TPA6120 headphone amplifier and an optimized PCB layout - isolating PCB layers and spacing sensitive traces away from other areas of the motherboard. Shielding is also utilized to minimize spurious noise from entering signal lines. High quality capacitors are used for power supply decoupling to minimize ripple and provide a low impedance at audio critical frequencies. The end result is a 120dB SNR, placing the Maximus VI Formula's onboard audio solution on par with the best discrete soundcards available.
On the software side, the latest addition to the package is Sonic Radar:
Sonic Radar is a HUD that is useful in FPS games. It shows a visual representation of where sounds are coming from. The location of footsteps, gunshots, explosions and anything else is shown in the 360 degree HUD while gaming:
BF3 – Sonic Radar showing direction of audio effects
The HUD can be made more transparent and its location on the screen changed. Sonic Radar very useful feature when gaming with stereo headsets, where surround effects are simulated and may not be easy to pinpoint.
On the subject of headsets, Perfect Voice has been added to improve the clarity of VOIP calls. It’s a software based filter that uses digital signal processing to remove noise pickup from your mic while making a call:
DSP helps reduce ambient noise for clearer comms
Perfect Voice works with any plug in microphone/headset to clean up voice transmission during calls.
With high density memory modules and kits becoming the norm, many of us have an abundance of free memory on our systems that never gets utilized. ROG RAM Disk has been coded to take advantage of that free space to help speed up the system.
ROG RAM Disk GUI
Unlike many free RAM drive tools, ROG RAM DISK has no size limitations – up to 80% of the free memory (not used by the OS) can be configured as a RAM drive.
To get you an idea of how fast a RAM drive is, check the screenshot below:
Applications stored on ROG RAM DISK are written to hard storage (HHD/SSD) when the system is prompted for shutdown.
Of course, re-installing games to the RAM DISK would be a painful experience. That's why ROG RAM DISK has a feature know as Junction Mode.
Setting a junction point to a game folder allows critical game files to be transferred to the RAM DISK without interfering with the original installation. Just point the software at the game folder and it will take care of the rest. This way, critical files such as maps can be accessed directly from the RAM DISK, speeding up load times.
Discussing features is fine, but what really matters for many users in knowing a board can overclock and run stable. How about 24 hour stability testing? Here's a few screenies from JJ, showing the Maximus VI Formula running different memory configs and CPU overclocks:
Over 24 hours AIDA64 passed at 4.7GHz DDR3-2800 16GB 4x4
Over 24 hours AIDA64 passed at 4.6GHz DDR3-2133 32GB 8X4
4.8GHz DDR3-2400 AIDA 1 Hour - right at the limits of the CPU and cooling
I managed to run some CFR sticks at DDR3-3000 on the 1.25x strap, which I couldn't do at all on the Extreme. It did require me to use initial BCLK lower than 125MHz for some reason.
