Overclocking

When you get yourself a board like the ASUS MAXIMUS IX FORMULA, you do so with overclocking in mind. With so many years of history behind the ROG branding as well as the MAXIMUS FORMULA name, you are not just going to overclock, but you want it to be easy, too. The same most definitely holds true with this ninth iteration of the MAXIMUS FORMULA, with overclocking being one of the most smooth operations ever to be had. Getting 3866 MHz out of these memory sticks wasn't hard at all; just enable XMP and go, which is as it should be.


With the board installed into a test bench of the sort I normally use for testing motherboards, things like the onboard buttons provided on the MAXIMUS IX FORMULA are more than welcome, as is the POST display you are sure to make use of if you're going to be pushing memory overclocks. The Retry, SAFE_BOOT, and Mem_OK buttons are located on the board's bottom edge, which puts them within easy reach as well.


It should be very obvious if it isn't already that the MAXIMUS IX FORMULA is intended to be used with watercooling since the CPU VRM cooler comes with a waterblock built in, but the watercooling features do not stop there. There are headers for flow-meter readings, along with the standard "LN2 Mode" switch and header for a thermal probe. There are dual-duty OC features here so that no matter how extreme you want to make your overclocking adventures, what you want and need is here.


ASUS first had their Q-Code LEDs many years ago, and they are still present, but what we also get is cleverly hidden near the 24-pin connector, with a set of four LEDS to indicate which part of the boot process the board is in, making quickly diagnosing common boot issues easy. You will also find a small hole in the CPU socket for a thermal probe, commonly attached to the bottom of a CPU when running LN2 cooling. This is what you can expect from top-dollar ROG boards, and I was not disappointed in what I found at all.