Asus Maximus Formula SE X38 - Living Review.

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Asus Maximus Formula SE X38 - Living Review.

(See also Asus Rampage Formula)

Today, I took delivery of the Asus Maximus Formula Special Edition. The Maximus features Intel's new X38 chipset, and what appears to be a huge selection of overclocking and voltage options!

The Maximus Formula Special Edition (to give it it's full title) is part of the Republic Of Gamer's series of motherboards from Asus, and to start with, I was a little apprehensive about owning another after the fiasco that was the Commando! - Will this one turn out to be a Maximus Decimus Meridius, or just a pain in the Gluteus Maximus?....

I am going to add to this review over the next few days and weeks, hence the name – Living Review


First Impressions

The front of the box.


A sneak peak at what is inside.


A Velcro fastener holds down the lid to reveal all the marketing bumf, and another sneaky peak of the on board cooling.



A closer look at that cooling.


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The motherboard and sound card (SupremeFX II) are packaged in their own protective plastic bubble, there is also a large box of accessories, which we will get to shortly.

My first impressions are that it certainly looks the part, and that SupremeFX II module looks interesting.


With the lid of the protective bubble removed, we can inspect the motherboard more closely...lets have a look what we have got.


Angled SATA connectors - very handy if you have a large graphics card such as an 8800GTX, this keeps the cables out of the way.

You can also see the angled PATA connector in the background as well - handy if you still use PATA devices.


Next, we have the on-board Power Switch and Reset Switch - these are purely aimed at the overclocking enthusiast and saves fumbling around with jumpers, although, there is also a CMOS clear switch on the board (see pic below this one), and a CMOS clear button on the rear panel as well, see the I/O panel pics further down.



CMOS clear switch - Another nice touch, and infinitely better than messing around with jumpers.



The board is dotted with small voltage indicating LEDs to denote "Crazy" "High" and "Normal" voltages for each specific item.

Here we have the DDR2 Voltage Indicators - The three little yellowy things on the right.

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Here we have the Southbridge Voltage Indicators.



And here are the CPU Voltage Indicators.



Now then, this was an oddly pleasing sight. During the Commando saga, it transpired that the problem boards were made in the Chinese factory, so it was nice to see this


This shot shows the Dual Phase PWMs for the memory.


Moving round to the back of the board, we can see what I/O socketry there is...

• 6x USB2.
• PS2 Keyboard socket.
• SPDIF Coaxial.
• SPDIF Optical.
• CMOS Reset Button.
• Firewire.
• Dual Gigabit LAN

You can also see two parts of the MOSFET heatsink assembly poking through, this is simply an air vent.





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Here is the I/O Panel from another angle, and you can see the CMOS Clear Button a bit better, and also note the lack of E-SATA - I'll bet that this is a minus point for a number of people.


Looking from the top left of the board, downwards...You can see that the MOSFET heatsinks are only copper coloured, anodised aluminium, and not actually copper. From a cosmetic point of view, I would have preferred plain silver aluminium.


As I was checking the board out, I noticed that things looked a bit crooked, see for yourself in the pic below. I'm not sure if it is just my board that is like this, or if they are all a bit wonky, but you can definitely see several items that aren't straight.



More crookedness.

Speaking of copper, here is the Northbridge with a hybrid air cooled/water cooled block/heatsink arrangement on it that Asus call, "Fusion". This setup is specific to the SE (Special Edition) Maximus Formula board, the non SE version just comes with an air cooled heatsink. I can't quite make up my mind if this is actually copper or not. it looks too shiny for copper, as if it is some kind of mix. Not sure about that, but I will not be using it for watercooling as you will see later on.



You can also see that the block unscrews from the front, using 4 phillips screws, and that means that you can leave the loop in your case if you need to remove the board - If you have watercooling, you'll know how much of a pig it can be to remove the board if one of the components doesn't come out easily!

The other slightly irksome thing with the watercooling side of this, is that they chose to use 3/8" barbs. I think it would have been better to use screw in barbs, then everyone is happy.

As it stands, Asus supply a bag of adapters (see second pic below), but they will absolutely murder your flow rate, so I am going to remove the Fusion block and use my own DangerDen Chipset Block - If it will fit


Flow rate murdering adapters.


More gratuitous shots of the Fusion.


A view of the Southbridge heatsink...let's hope that those heatpipes work eh?


As with several of the Asus boards I've had in the last year or so, there was some odd sticky substance on the back of the board, and also some pink waxy bits stuck to the PCB - Maybe the factory robots need Bromide?

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There isn't much to see round the back of the motherboard, apart from the copper coloured backplate for the Fusion cooler.


And a close up of the backplate for those who care.
This appears to also be copper coloured anodised aluminium, and is insulated from the motherboard using rubber (maybe plastic) washers.


Next up is the SupremeFX II card - It certainly looks impressive, with its fancy black and silver cover, and it is PCI-E, which is great if you need the PCI slots, but how does it sound? I will test it later.

Top view.


Back view.


I was trying to see under the cowelling/cover thing here, but doesn't look like there is much to see.


Nice attention to detail.


All this will be hidden when it is fitted, so its relatively pointless, unless you have an upside down case, or no case at all...AHAA!


Here's the Ins and outs for the SupremeFX II - pretty standard stuff here, move along.


Next, the included box of accessories.


Inside the box...


Its a pretty decent bundle overall I think. A decent game, the LCD Poster (more on that later), the usual cables, a USB/Firewire bracket to give an extra 2 USB and 1 Firewire, I/O Shield, MOSFET Fan, PATA/Floppy cables, a bag of cable ties and THE most useful thing ever to be bundled with a motherboard, and deserve a pic of their own (see second pic down).....


Drum roll please....


LCD Poster.


LCD Poster Back.


That's all the box contents and first impressions out of the way....

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Test Setup;




The reason I have listed two systems is because I am going to split the review into two sections, the first section will be with the board built up, out of the case using air cooling, and the second part will be in the case fully watercooled, and that should give people a better idea of what it achievable using both types of cooling.

Anyway, onwards we go....

The specs directly from the Asus website are as follows;




As you can see, the Maximus is absolutely packed with features and comes with S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Kaspersky Anti-Virus, 3DMark06 and the usual Asus software, including PC Probe II, Asus AI Suite, Drivers Disk and the curse of many support forums - Asus Update (Avoid using this to flash your BIOS in windows, it often ends in an RMA, unfortunately.).

One of the main selling points of the X38 motherboards is the addition of a second 16x PCI-E 2 slot**. This means that these boards can utilise two top end ATI/AMD cards in crossfire, with no discernible drop in performance on the second card, unlike the P35 boards that, standard , could only manage 4x for the second PCI-E slot. Of course, there are some P35 motherboards that can manage dual 8x PCI-E slots using crosslink technology, but that's a story for another day.

The other can of worms that dual 16x slots throws up is SLI. There will probably be hacked drivers to utilise dual Nvidia cards in the not too distant future, but as Nvidia appear to be struggling to get their own drivers in order, who knows how long that will take, so watch this space (If you know of any hacked X38 Drivers for SLI, please let me know!)

**PCI-E 2 effectively doubles the standard PCI-E bus bandwidth from 2.5Gbit/s to 5Gbit/s, and on 32x capable boards, up to 16GB/s. The PCI-E 2 slots are backwards compatible with PCI-E 1.1, 1x, 4x and 8x cards as well.

Now to get the system built up and see what it can do....

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All Built Up!

Lets have a look at the BIOS, with everything at stock/factory settings, unless specified...

Right away, you should be able to see a lot of new features, especially if you have come from a P5B/P5K series board - As some of these are new to me, and I haven't had a play with them yet, I will just post the pics, and then when we get to the overclocking part of the review, I will go into more detail on what they do/don't do


Everything at auto for now.


The next settings look to be pre-sets to automatically take you to the speeds of the CPUs in the list.


More Presets! - I will test these out later.



CPU Ratio, standard stuff - it just lets you adjust the multiplier (only downwards, unless you have an Extreme series CPU).


Northbridge Strap selection - I found this unstable on the P35 boards, but I will give it another shot on this one to see if they have changed anything.


Your RAM Dividers are here, a pretty standard selection at stock speeds, but I'm guessing that there will be more of a choice once we start overclocking.


DRAM Timing Control - Set this to manual to set your memory timings!


DRAM Static Read Control.


Ai Clock Twister - This is a new one on me, sounds vaguely rude.


Transaction Booster - This was hit and miss on the P5K series for me, mostly of no use whatsoever, but we will see.



These next few are obviously something to do with those voltage LEDs that I showed you earlier in the review, I have no idea what they do, but I will have a play and let you know.


And this one looks like it turns those LEDs on and off.

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CPU Spectrum - I always disable this, I can't see things being any different this time round


Same with this - But I will try both of them enabled later on.


Ok, thats the main "Extreme Tweaker" settings out of the way - Lets have a look at the settings when we set Ai Overclock Tuner to manual...

Not much really, it just removes the AUTO setting from a few of the settings - but I prefer to set most things manually anyway, so that's good


Here, you can set the DRAM frequency, and I'm setting it 1:1, just while I get up and running.


RAM Timings set.


Everything is on AYUTO by default here...I will need to change the RAM voltage manually.


And speaking of RAM voltage....YIKES! it goes up to 3.4v! - Thats almost double the standard voltage for DDR2...Great for the hardcore benching nutters though


I have selected the 2.2v for my RAM and it has highlighted it in green. There is also a little green LED lit on the board to tell me that the voltage is ok.


Next, the familiar CPU configuration. Nothing new to see here.


Move along..


Back to the sub menu, and then into "Chipset" we have this - again, nothing new.


Back to the sub menu and then into "Onboard Devices Configuration" we have this. there is the option to turn of the dreaded Jmicron controller, and also settings to turn off the LCD Poster backlight..you can see them all for yourself in the pic




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Back to the sub menu and into USB Configuration - Nothing to report here.


Back to the sub menu and into PCIPnP - again, nothing new.


Power modes.


Boot Devices.


Nothing changed here either in the Boot menu.


Security


Tools - this is where you find EZFlash.


Ok, thats the BIOS out of the way....lets see what she can do in the overclocking department

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Right..



Unfortunately, this board doesnt like my B3 Q6600.

With my P5K Deluxe, I was able to hit 447FSB with this particular CPU, but with the 0401 BIOS, I could only hit a measily 410x9 and needed over 1.65v to get there - time to try the latest offering from the Asus FTP site, which is currently 0504.

0504 wasnt much better for the B3. The northbridge was running at 64c, even with a fan on the heatsink, so I decided to abandon the air cooling tests and go straight to the watercooling tests, this should rule out any instability problems that may have been due to the Northbridge overheating.

The only real thing that I can take from the last part of the review, is that the Thermalright Ultra 120 Etreme heatsink fits on this board just fine

On to the water cooling....

As I mentioned earlier in the review, I decided not to use the Maximus's Fusion waterblock because I wasnt sure what it was made of (don't want any aluminium in my loop), and also, it has the wrong size barbs and I didnt want to use the adaptors.

UPDATE 18-10-07: CAUTION! - I have seen a couple of people damage their boards so far because the thermal cement that Asus use is just too strong. See this post for what can happen if you aren't careful enough. If possible, remove the fusion block and replace the thermal cement on the NB and SB BEFORE you fire the board up for the first time. The cement seems to harden and cure when it gets hot, so be aware of that.

So, I started by removing the Fusion block - it came off with a small amount of pressure. I used a small pair of fine nosed angled pliers. I covered the area close to the NB with masking tape, so the PCB wouldn't get scratched if there was any slippage, and gently used the angled nose of the pliers to lever up the block. Start at one corner and work your way along and you should hear the cement give way as you get to the next corner. The SB came off at the same time for me, but if not, just use the same method, and take your time.


Back view.


Here is the board without any of its cooling on.


The mosfet area and Northbridge. Note the IHS - great for fitting a waterblock!


Here is the mosfet part of the cooling system separated from the Fusion block.


I concluded that the fugly fake copper wasn't going to look nice, so I set about fitting the trusty Thermalright HR-09U and HR-09S. These went on with a slight modification, very similar to the one I did for my P5K. If you are wondering why the top HR-09 has one end sticking up in the air, it's because the right hand side of it screws in place using the same screw and hole that secures the centre top of the motherboard as well, so, kill two birds with one stone!


Here is the mod needed for the left hand HR-09 if anyone is interested!


A quick test shows that my Danger Den chipset block sits perfectly flat, and you may be wondering what the masking tape is for...its just to prevent any shorts and scrapes while tightening up the nuts.


Here you can see the blocks in place..I forgot to remove the masking tape for the pics .


I put the G0 back in as well.

Slightly concerning is that the RAM is showing 2.27v, and yet it is set to 2.2v in the BIOS.


Ok, I was having trouble getting stable for more than 20 mins at a time last night, and it turns out that the RAM needs to be in the white slots for my particular setup - nothing new there, every Asus board that I've used recently has been like that, and also, Several of the voltages needed upping a bit. Again, this wasnt needed on the P5K Deluxe to achieve the same overclock.

So, just to be sure, I left prime running over night 400x9 1.45v (see what I mean about it needing more juice than the P5K?)

Here are the overnight priming results.



A few quick benches..not tested for stability yet, just a quick superpi 1M, and not done anything with the RAM yet.

3870Mhz
CPU-Z Validator Database

3960Mhz
CPU-Z Validator Database

More to follow...