Asus Maximus IV Extreme Motherboard Review

As with all of our reviews, we pit the default speed system against the overclocked one in a head-to-head byte match.  The effective overclock for these tests is 5.0GHz @ 49x multiplier and 103 BLCK.  The results are show below.

Overclocking the Sandy Bridge architecture is a little different from what we are accustomed to, in fact the process reminds us of the old days when there was only a few clocks you could adjust and the combo of those would be the resulting overclock.

When we started out overclocking this motherboard 4.6Ghz was easily attained though as we started approaching 4.8Ghz the everything began to destabilize and voltage adjustments didn't seem to help.  So, in a fit of wisdom, we hit the web looking for an answer.  Much to our astonishment we found one on the ROG Forums.  Not only did the guide walk us thru each of the BIOS settings but it also gave suggestions as to change to reach a certain frequency.  Needless to say after 10min of tuning the 5Ghz mark was once again realized and rock stable to boot.

Scores at 5Ghz are simply amazing, two of our gaming benchmarks hit 400+ FPS and our synthetic memory scores are starting to get very close to the magical 30GB/s mark.