Overclocking

The "Crazy" auto-overclocking feature works great by simply throwing an extra 100MHz on the CPU front side bus and a bit more voltage with just the one setting.

On both boards, we threw in an E6750 G0 and it went right over 500MHz FSB easily without the need for coaxing, but then our CPU decided to call it a day at just 10MHz more than that. Our quad-core overclocking endeavours also delivered 500MHz FSB speeds with relative ease, but we now needed to use a few "red" voltages. For some sheer MHz, we dropped in the QX9650 and managed to get a very decent 4.4GHz out of it.

Stability

For the Extreme, we dropped in a new Intel QX9770 for a laugh since it landed at our office the other day, even though the board or BIOS even won't ever officially support it (you'll have to buy a whole new board with the X48 chipset for that). The Extreme still set itself to 8x400 and was more than happy enough to complete 24 hours of Prime95 Torture test and 3DMark looping with CrossFire running. So, do you need an X48? Not really.

The Formula was far less reliable - twice, within a couple of hours of starting, the PC had either rebooted or crashed 3DMark06. We tried a complete OS reinstall and used a dual-core CPU instead of quad-core, but the result was the same. Even though it had been stable throughout testing, it certainly was not happy under extended load.

Warranty

Asus gives a usual three year warranty with the boards which, broadly speaking, is about industry standard. However, for an expensive performance motherboard one part of me wants to cement the investment with a longer warranty, but the other part argues that three years is sufficiently long enough for enthusiasts to have upgraded already. One part of the enthusiast regime is to fund future investment of parts by selling on current kit - which again means warranty becomes a key factor.

One of the worries was that because of the short shelf-life of some of the products, RMAing a board will cause you to get back a different one. After discussing this with Asus this seems to thankfully not be the case - the board you return will attempt to be fixed, otherwise it'll be replaced with an identical model.

Power Consumption

We tried to use the EPU with our Formula but during auto-calibration it constantly kept crashing. On reinstalling for the stability test above we tried again and got exactly the same outcome. The Extreme worked just fine and like we found with the P5E3, it not only lowers the idle power usage below that of normal but it also slightly overclocks the CPU under load, within a reduced overall power envelope as well.

Value

Overall, the two boards are unsurprisingly some of the most expensive on the market but are they worth it? They aren't the silly £200+ numbers that had our knees clacking together, back before X38 launched, and that's not to say people haven't bought £200+ motherboards before - remember the Asus Striker Extreme and to a lesser extent, the Abit IN9-32X MAX? The Extreme is £15-20 more than the Formula SE and the SE is around £5-£10 more than the non-SE version depending on where you shop.

As far as X38-based boards go, they are both far more expensive than the Gigabyte X38s but they do offer a load more features which we've already discussed. Other X38 boards, like the Abit IX38 QuadGT for example is only £150 now. The MSI X38 Diamond with four x16 slots is about the same price as the Formula at £167. The Abit IP35 Pro we compared these two in the results is just £105 now, so that's a £60-80 saving straight off. Could you put that towards more memory, a better CPU or faster graphics card?

Does the branding, style and features warrant the extra cost of both the boards? The P35 may be much cheaper but you're losing the advantages of dual PCI-Express x16 and Gen-2.0 support for CrossFire that you get with an X38-based board. If you want a combination of the two then you might as well just get a Gigabyte GA-X38-DS5 and save yourself around £30 or £40. That's still a significant chunk of change. The Asus P5E is arguably an even better choice because it has the same EPU as the RoG boards and a huge heatsink but it's again a fraction of the price at £130.

But then again - people who buy the RoG boards do so because of the overwhelming feature list, not because they are necessarily the best value: if you're wanting them for the integrated northbridge waterblocks, money is certainly less of an issue because you've already had the funds to invest in an expensive watercooling kit anyway. It entirely depends on what you perceive as "value for money" an what your intended setup will be.

Conclusions

For once I actually think Asus has the DDR3 model more correct than the DDR2 one: these boards are expensive so people are going to have more to spend anyway. If you want a cheaper, X38-based DDR2 board save yourself a lot of money and get a P5E or Gigabyte X38 DS5.

The Extreme has proper multi-GPU and even though CrossFireX isn't available yet (and may not be, depending on driver support in the future), the expansion will be there, ready for the future. The board looks crazier, you get eSATA, it's generally more stable and all of the features work properly. And there's also the fact that the Fusion northbridge block has been updated with something better.

Yes, the PCI-Express splitter chipset does downgrade the available bandwidth a lot which goes against the "ultimate performance" undertone, but it's better implemented than the MSI X38 Diamond's alternative. The Asus has two important advantages: almost plentiful x8 slots versus a pair of crippling x4s and they are all dual slot compatible. Compromises have to be made when you're hacking up a chipset to do more than it was designed to do, but like a geeky Goldylocks, MSI went too far and Asus has got the balance just right.


Admittedly I do secretly want the RoG series to be more DFI LANParty-esq in its fundamentalist extremism (the only time when that's a good thing), where if you're not sure about an board or BIOS feature, it's tough shh...ugar, but that would and has alienated a lot of people in the past. Thankfully Asus continues to strike the balance of wide appeal and attitude but without the elitism.

Performance is at best, hit and miss. We did tune the boards as best we could, with regards to memory timings and enhanced performance options available in the BIOS, but the test results came out a bit sporadic. I think it simply just cements the fact that the X38 chipset isn't actually that great - I know a lot of effort was put into DDR3 performance which doesn't inherently lend itself to a large gap from DDR2 anyway, and as it is, Intel CPUs don't need a huge tonne of bandwidth thanks to the massive shared L2 caches. It reaffirms that a DDR2-based P35 motherboard still makes a fantastic motherboard of excellent value when it's running at stock clocks. In this respect, Intel has shot itself in the foot and it has made the job of selling X38 boards a lot harder for companies like Asus.

Asus might have a pair of engineering triumphs that ooze cool, but at the end of the day you're forking out a lot of money for the privilege of looking good, tonnes of features, overclocking potential provided you have other components to use it and CrossFire(X) performance from the Extreme. Is this how it's meant to be though: wasn't overclocking meant to be "free" performance?

Final Thoughts

Thankfully the Radeon HD 3800 series cards are what AMD needed to reinvigorate its CrossFire platform and in that respect it finally makes sense to buy an X38 if you want to go down that route - stay tuned for our review of those cards very soon. If you are a performance nut, it helps, because there's tonnes of options to play with, but even if you aren't then a single click to "Crazy" in the BIOS will shoot that CPU so high it'll end up in orbit. The EPU, again, works fantastically on the Extreme at least, and you don't even need to worry about the future X48 chipset, because this board will work stably with 1,600MHz FSB CPUs, even if the support is "unofficial".

I'm not going to deny the boards have left me a bit deflated, despite the whole host of features - they just hasn't really done it for me. The Extreme is mightily expensive and requires expensive DDR3 memory, which unfortunately puts it out of most people's league. Having said that though, its featureset means it's not designed for those that want of cheap - it's designed to be awesome. And it does that bit pretty well.

The Formula might be DDR2-based, but it hasn't shown itself to really be a worthy purchase. Personally if I wanted a DDR2-based X38 board, the cheaper Asus P5E or Gigabyte X38-DS5 are now far more appealing (oh how the benefit of hindsight grates me for only giving it a seven overall) and I'll use that extra £30/40 to get a faster graphics card - they both have a far more appropriate price:performance ratio.

The Striker Extreme II board is due out soon for you SLI nuts, and there should also be a board based on Intel's X48 chipset too, should Asus have plans to update the Maximus with that. If I had the money and I wanted a DDR3 board then the Maximus Extreme is the only motherboard I've seen thus far that's worth seriously considering, but if I wanted the a more cost-effective DDR2-based board, just get what I suggested above or try to grab a second hand Blitz Formula.

Asus Maximus Extreme

• Features
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• 10/10

• Performance
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• 8/10

• Value
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• -
• 7/10

• Overall
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• 8/10

Asus Maximus Formula SE

• Features
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• 9/10

• Performance
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• -
• -
• 6/10

• Value
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• -
• -
• 6/10

• Overall
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• -
• 7/10

What do these scores mean?