Asus Maximus VIII Formula Review

Overclocking and EFI

There's not a whole lot more on offer in the EFI than cheaper ROG boards but in terms of gunning for a maximum overclock with air or watercooling, the Formula did prove to be a tad better than all but the Maximus VIII Impact in getting the most out of our Core i7-6700K.

We hit 4.9GHz - the joint best result we've seen, using a vcore of 1.41V, and that's all we needed to change. 5GHz was bootable, but not matter what we tried, from different overclocking modes to additional voltage or loadline calibration. Not that an easy overclock is a bad thing, but that's just the way things are these days - at least without high-end watercooling or liquid nitrogen.

The EFI, as you can see below is up to the usual high ROG standard and has everything you need from a favourites section, comprehensive overclocking section with everything in one place plus a handy fan control suite too. You can choose PWM or DC modes and for the four chassis fans, there's the option to have a portion of the fan profile curve set to off for quiet running - that's not possible for the CPU or EXT fan settings though.

Finally, there's a built-in SSD secure erase feature that's been around for a couple of generations now, but is potentially handy if you want to wipe a used SSD, either to sell it or to refresh its performance.