Overclocked Performance Summary

I have really changed how I do my overclock testing with motherboards. Every single test you see in the main section is repeated in the section that follows, including power consumption. As I test more products, a good picture of overclocking efficiency should emerge, which should prove interesting when it comes to those products that are 100% overclocking-oriented. I have grouped the results into sections here, and all Intel products are tested with 4.6 GHz CPU speed. Memory speeds vary depending on the platform's ability. I'll report it here if a board fails to pass one of these tests, I need to increase voltages, or am perhaps allowed to drop voltages.


Overclocking with the ASUS MAXIMUS VI HERO was really easy. ASUS has spent considerable time optimizing every product's BIOS to make general overclocking as easy as possible for the end user while still offering all the necessary options expert users require. The ASUS MAXIMUS VI HERO ran my reference OC after I enabled the XMP profile for my DIMMs and adjusted both CPU- and Cache voltage. I also managed to get that overclock using slightly lower options in the BIOS than with other boards. 1.275V was more than enough, but I also noticed that the CPU at times received nearly 1.3V, which might explain the higher power consumption I remarked on earlier. Memory and BCLK overclocking works nearly perfectly on the ASUS MAXIMUS VI HERO, being much more advanced than on some other boards. That said, I also came across some issues with Samsung IC-based, high-performance DIMMs, but this particular problem is common to every board I have tested so far, and when asked, ASUS acknowledged that they were trying to get it fixed. I've been provided with quite a few BETA BIOS options to test and have seen several OC-centric BIOS releases on various forums that strictly focus on the overclocker. Overclocking is damn good now, and it's definitely going to get better soon. Although not far behind at the time I write this, many other boards seem to play catch-up with ASUS right now. Performance here is a bit varied, but that's to accommodate getting the highest frequencies possible regardless of your chip's quality, and performance can be improved in all situations with some manual tweaking. The ASUS MAXIMUS VI HERO is very much for the user with a bit of advanced knowledge to capitalize on what's here, as the huge number of options offered can definitely be quite overwhelming at first, especially considering that this platform is merely a few weeks old.

AIDA64

CPU OC Performance

3D-Oriented OC Performance

3DMark06 and 3DMark Vantage

3DMark11 and PCMark 07

3DMark

Metro: Last Light

Sniper Elite V2

Shogun 2

F1 2010