The ASUS MAXIMUS IX FORMULA most definitely carries on a long-standing tradition for MAXIMUS FORMULA motherboards, and this ninth iteration of that product from long ago has been highly tuned and refined, and updated to meet the latest technology we have on offer today. What ASUS does here is very specific, and they do it very well. I owned those first few MAXIMUS FORMULA boards from what seem like an age ago. Benchmarks like 3DMark06 were all the rage (If I recall correctly, 3DMark06 was in the box even). I spent a lot of money on that board and the CPU and memory and VGAs that went along with it. It is crazy to me to go back to the product page from so long ago and see things like DDR2 and X38. I bought the "Special Edition" board, and you can find pictures of that system here on TPU, with 2900XT and 3870X2 VGAs and Crucial Ballistix Tracer memory. Boy, those were the days... I really expected so much.

Here we are now, many years later, with Intel's Z270 instead of X38. My expectations have not changed. Nearly a decade has gone by and we still have this same motherboard design; a design built with some watercooling (DTek Fusion, anyone?), memory overclocking, and multiple GPUs in mind. I owned all this stuff, bought with hard-earned dollars. I have been using these real enthusiast things ever since, so I can truly safely say that little has really changed. Core 2 Quad is now Core i7... Q6600 replaced with a 6600K... In case you haven't noticed yet, the ASUS MAXIMUS IX FORMULA has certainly brought me a whole bunch of nostalgia, and you can take that as a good or bad thing; the choice is yours. The original MAXIMUS FORMULA was a board I chose back then, and I certainly want to build a gaming PC for myself with this current re-hash of decade-old stuff. If you're looking for real innovation, there is some of that to be had here, but the bigger story, for me, is where this board really began and how successfully this modern motherboard honors and deserves the "IX" moniker ASUS stuffed between "MAXIMUS" and "FORMULA".

So, of course, it is 2017 now, not 2007, and perhaps watercooling a motherboard is outdated. An overwhelming majority of the people who might buy such a board aren't going to put it under LN2 either, so I don't exactly know why you need all these extreme overclocking features here. There are other ASUS boards that are better for those uses anyway. There is so much about a MAXIMUS FORMULA board that is excessive and unnecessary, but you know what? It has ALWAYS been that way, and it is that way for a reason. ASUS certainly has this FORMULA right, and I can see no good reason to change it. I might say there's no need for those extreme overclocking features, but the truth of the matter is them being here is part of why these boards are so strong in the first place. If only they didn't cost so much because everyone deserves this type of an experience, although without the currently present audio driver problem.