Asus Maximus VII Impact Review

Overclocking

For all the plethora of overclocking options in the Impact's EFI, if you're not dealing with extreme cooling, it's likely just the vcore and possibly loadline calibration you'll need. Our usual setting of 1.28V vcore wasn't enough to get stability with the Impact, although boosting loadline calibration to level 9 did see an improvment

In the end we had to raise the vcore to 1.3V - one of the highest for a Z97 motherboard, but the temperatures were actually a little cooler than we're used to as well. In any event, the Impact is a member of our prestigious 4.8GHz club and with better cooling, it has all the tools you'll need to push it further.

EFI and Software features

The EFI is just as feature-laden as the Impact itself and special mention goes to the built-in SSD Secure Erase. We're also happy to confirm that the Impact CoolHub card's additional fan headers show up in the Q-Fan tuning page too, allowing you to tweak the fan curve profiles. There's ROG RAMDisk and Sonic Radar II, both of which you can read about in our Maximus VI Extreme review when we first looked at them.












Head over the page to see the performance analysis and conclusion