Asus Maximus II Formula

Author: Richard Swinburne
Published: 29th September 2008
Comments (26) Stumble
The layout is generally very good and everything important is easily accessible around the edges of the board. Even though the memory slots appear quite low set, there's just enough room to get the DIMMs out when a long graphics card is installed. However, if you have particularly long PCI or a PCI-Express card (if you aren't using the on-board audio in the black x1 socket since it doubles up) then you may be out of luck.

Because of the mirrored peripheral slot layout there will always be at least one PCI or PCI-Express x1 slot available when dual height graphics cards are installed, and thankfully Asus hasn't tried to cram in more under the guise of "future physics" or whatever else. It's a clear cut design, partly thanks to the fact that ATI CrossFireX only needs two cards for up to four GPUs, rather than Nvidia's three for three.

In addition, Asus' eight SATA sockets are all useful even when both PCI-Express slots are populated, and unlike the P5Q Deluxe the non-90 degree SATA ports are actually all useful this time. As usual six of the ports are from the ICH10R and the other two are from the same "Speeding Hard Disk" feature Asus includes thanks to a Silicon Image chipset. It's basically a fancy name for RAID 0 and the SATA ports will still accept single hard drives like normal.

Asus Maximus II Formula Board Layout Continued Asus Maximus II Formula Board Layout Continued
The heatsinks are screwed in for better pressure and contact - Click to enlarge

Unlike some previous RoG boards, Asus does include eSATA for a change and it has also used the better Marvell 88SE6121 chipset, rather than the problematic JMicron chipset we've become accustomed to. There's a single port on the rear I/O and the internal IDE socket is also controlled by the same chip.

Instead of the usual backlit on-board power and reset buttons, Asus has gone for something a little more extravagant this time around: you'll not "power" the PC any more, you'll "start" it. First, we had to complete the infamous Martin test, where it scores quite a high mark - educated by the man who invented it himself I was told what to look for: it gives a firm, reassuring click where the indent for the finger gives an extremely satisfying feeling.

Asus Maximus II Formula Board Layout Continued Asus Maximus II Formula Board Layout Continued
Asus Maximus II Formula Board Layout Continued
The "Speeding HDD SATA ports are black, and the rest are in blue. The buttons are easy to reach at the bottom of the board - Click to enlarge

The only downside is that it's a touch wobbly and a bit plasticy. We can't help but think of the new generation of start buttons in cars - we'll be needing an RFID keyring next, which, on second thought might be a great idea for LANs actually - what's safer: A ten digit password to login to your OS or something like a 256-bit AES encrypted randomly generated digital passcode?

On-board there are two BIOS chips - that's not unusual for BIOS redundancy, however in this instance you can manually select which BIOS to flash or boot from using the on-board pin-outs. You can also use the pin headers to copy one BIOS to the other if you're unhappy with it or if a BIOS flash has gone wrong. This allows an extra level of control affording less risk when trying new (beta) BIOSes.

Asus Maximus II Formula Board Layout Continued Asus Maximus II Formula Board Layout Continued
The 16 phase power regulation surrounding the CPU socket and northbridge cooling section along with backlit Republic of Gamer logo - Click to enlarge

The power regulation is very similar to the P5Q Deluxe - the northbridge gets three phases, the memory gets a pair of phases and the CPU socket gets 16 phases along with Asus' new EPU-2, which regulates the use between just four and the full 16 phases. Compared to competing solutions this lacks the finesse of Gigabyte's Dynamic Energy Saver or much less than MSI's DrMOS and Green Power.

This is compensated by the fact that Asus' EPU-2 is a hardware-software solution that manipulates the front side bus in addition to Intel's C1E state changing the multiplier down to the basic 6x. By dropping both further, power can be saved as the frequencies are reduced, however it's harder to control so more prone to crashing the PC, and you can't manually overclock at the same time. We discussed the EPU and its software more in detail here.

Finally Asus includes a pair of PCI-Express Gigabit Ethernet controllers that include the teaming function, but there's no WiFi, presumably because of space, cost and the fact gamers would always prefer the reliability of a wired connection for an optimal ping.

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