Overclocking Hardware Summary
ASUS has taken their standard ROG twist and slammed everything from the BIOS down to the buttons and on to the monitoring and fan-controlling capabilities into the tiny MAXIMUS VI IMPACT – not a single step in the ROG march was missed.
LN2 jumpers, 4-pin fan headers all around, and intelligently placed EPS and 24-pin power plugs – I was really impressed to find it all.
The dual Super I/O design of other ROG boards is present as well, although both chips are sitting right next to one another this time around.
You obviously cannot ignore the huge PCB on the side that holds all of the parts that make up the CPU and DIMM power sections. Just like on other MAXIMUS VI products for Intel's Z87 chipset, there is a decent cooler on both the front and back to keep things cool.
You can see that a decent amount of thought went into the design and layout of these parts, and that they aren’t there for purely esthetic reasons.
Once you look at the IMPACT's actual power design, it becomes pretty clear that the VRMs are the same as on fully sized ROG MAXIMUS VI boards, so you can easily expect the same overclockability, if not higher, with the tiny IMPACT board.
Both VRM controllers, one for the CPU power section and one for the DIMM power section, are on the backside, so you can safely push this board to the limit under even the extremes of LN2 cooling. That LN2 jumper is not just there for show.