[Review] ASUS Maximus IV Extreme & Core i7 2600K – Overclocking On P67 (Part 1/2)

31 CommentsBy miahallen

closeAuthor: miahallen Name: Jeremiah Allen
Email: miahallen.ironmods@gmail.com
Site: http://www.ironmods.com
About: Well, I was playing with computers ever since my Dad got a Commodore 64 when I was 6 years old (1986), when I was 10 (1990) he bought a custom build 486DX33, and I was in love. Mostly back then I was just a kid playing games, but my fascination with computers had a start. Because I had no money of my own, I was stuck playing with my Dad's computers, and really couldn't "play" too much. So in 1998, the year I graduated, I spent some of my college savings to by a "computer for school", haha. It had two Voodoo2 12MB 3D accelerators in it, so you can imagine how much school work was done on it ;-) It had an AMD K6-233 that I had a really mild OC on, but my custom computer builder friend Aaron had done all the work. So I can't really take the credit there. My fascination with graphics just kept growing and growing over the years, and I was constantly in a struggle to keep my games looking as sharp and smooth as possible. OCing played a big role. My whole world was rocked in 2004 when I was deployed to Iraq as a US Army soldier. The whole year I was there I had a cheap IBM Thinkpad R40 with a 2GHz Celeron, 1GB DDR-333 RAM, a 60GB 4200RPM HDD, and ATI Radeon Mobility graphics (same technology as a 7000 series with only 16MB of memory). It started out rough as I was really into Command and Conquer Generals at the time, and the machine would only play the C&C slide show LOL. So, I downloaded PowerStrip, and OC'ed the GPU by 40%...amazingly, the game was playable! Things changed dramatically in 2007 when I met a guy named Matt while I was stationed in Japan. He introduced me to www.ocforums.com, and the "Benchmarking Team" there. I had not had much interest in benchmarking previously, I always though of myself as more practical. But, I thought I'd play along and I joined the team. My first introduction to an actual competition was was is "The Raptor Pit", "Forum Warz 2008" in the spring of 2008. I was running a Q6600 and an 8800GTX. With air cooling I was able to bench my Q6600 at over 4GHz, and tore up the competition in my class. Overall OCF won the Forum War in 2007, Winter and Summer of 2008, and 2009...that means five in a row. I was not part of the first one in 2007, but the four since then, I have participated in. After winning the 2008 Winter and Summer Warz, Tom's Hardware Guide announced they were looking for nominations for individuals to compete in their first ever international overclocking competition, called "Overdrive". I was nominated, and chosen to compete in the North American semi-finals in Los Angeles in November 2008. I was placed on "Team IRONMODS" as they only had two guys, yet three man teams were allowed. We won the semi-finals in LA, and our prize was a trip to Paris the following month, to compete with the best in the world. The following month, Ton, Jake, and myself flew to Paris as "Team USA" to face off against the best from Taiwan, France, Germany, and Italy. It was a very intense competition, but after two heated days of battle (16 hours of benching), we emerged the victors. Amidst our celebration, Ton and Jake officially invited me to join "Team IRONMODS" on a permanent basis, and I graciously accepted. Ton, aka "TiTON", is a world renown case moder, and is also very well known for some of the AMD overclocking he has done. Jake, aka "CPT.Planet", is a genius overclocker, and a really fun guy. The team has a great synergy when working together, we really have complementary styles. After winning the world championship in December 2008 things were a bit quite for a couple months, then in the spring of 2009 I received an invitation to the 2nd annual Gigabyte Open Overclocking Championship "GOOC". I would compete in the North American semi-final in LA, where the winner would win a ticket to the world championship in Taipei Taiwan during CES in June 2009. The competition was tough with 14 of the best from North America gathering for a 1 on 1 competition of OCing. But once again, I completed the competition well, and rose above the others. I won 1st place and the trip to the world finals in Taipei. My luck ran dry in Taipei where I started off with a bad motherboard, and went through 5 more during the course of the competition due to various reasons. Despite the poor finish in Taipei, I have high hopes to redeem myself next year.See Authors Posts (24) on January 2, 2011

*** Part 2 has been posted, feel free to check it out here ***

Introduction

Today we’re facing the launch of a brand new architecture from Intel dubbed “Sandy Bridge”. If you haven’t seen the leaks around the net over the past few months, you haven’t been paying attention. Everyone is excited about the potential of this new architecture, and it’s no wonder. The rumors of nearly 5GHz with air cooling coupled with a healthy dose of architectural efficiency improvements will create a lot of happy enthusiasts. The manufacturers in this game have not been sitting idle either, with each one cleverly seeding tons of samples to add to the pre-launch hype.

Maximus IV Extreme

My subject today is the new Asus Maximus IV Extreme, a Republic of Gamers (“ROG”) branded model which represents the top-end of the P67 offerings from Asus. As always, they’ve managed to pack an overwhelming number of technologies and features into this product and it’s my goal to give you honest feedback based on my experience.

Asus Maximus IV Extreme

The Maximus IV Extreme motherboard represents the top-end of the Asus lineup for the P67 launch. As such, it is a full-featured product, and unfortunately, does not conform to the standard ATX form factor as it is slightly wider at 10.6″ as opposed to the standard 9.6″ of the ATX specification. This is fairly common among top-range boards these days and is unlikely to be an issue with any large modern case.

Maximus IV Extreme 1

The new socket, LGA1155, is the same size as the LGA1156 socket for the H55/H57/P55 platform, so all of your LGA1156 coolers should work fine for the new socket as well.

Maximus IV Extreme 2

The board layout is fairly conventional, but the socket area is a little tight (more details on that in a bit).

Maximus IV Extreme 3

The underside of the board reveals more about the quality design, with additional heat spreaders on the rear of the VRM section (with proper screws no less!).

Maximus IV Extreme 4

Next: The ASUS Maximus IV Extreme Continued…

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CATEGORIES: Extreme, Gaming, Intel, Motherboards & Chipsets, Overclocking, Processors, Reviews
TAGS: 2600K, Asus, ASUS Maximus IV Extreme, ASUSTek, Core i7 2600K, CPU, Extreme, Formula, III, Intel, IV, Maximus, P67, P67 Chipset, Republic of Gamers, review, ROG, Sandy Bridge, Sandybridge

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