Asus MAXIMUS VI HERO Z87 Motherboard

Well, I wouldn’t say DDR4 is the hot setup right now. At least not yet. There aren’t many processors/mainboards that support it, and DDR4 is considerably more expensive. Now revisit this in a few more months, and we’ll see if that’s changed.

I’ve owned a total of 3 Asus motherboards over the past 10 years. Each one I purchased was specifically for a new computer; ie I never had any issues with any of them I simply chose to upgrade my computer 3 times. They were all high end systems and were overclocked from day 1. In my experience, their boards are some of the best and most reliable out there. They keep updating bios many years after a board is released as well. Right now I’m still running a 3 year old P67 Sabertooth board with a Sandy Bridge @ 4.8Ghz 24/7. Can’t wait for Skylake for DDR4 and a new Asus board :slight_smile:

I own this motherboard, and am using it in my current gaming PC. It’s been a pleasure to work with.

To clarify the specs in a few places, it does support Quad SLI / Crossfire, provided you use one of the dual unit solutions, such as the AMD R9 295x2, which is two cards on a single slot. For the rest of us it can only realistically support 2 cards, as the last slot is x4 only.

Same thing happened to me. I RMA’d my ASUS motherboard and it took nearly two months (!) to get the replacement.

I couldn’t be without a computer for that long so I wound up buying a new mobo and selling the Asus on eBay when it finally showed up.

Meh. Nobody runs more than 2 pcie slots at full x16 width and intel chipsets only support one.

MAXIMUS VI HERO Product Support
MAXIMUS VI HERO Supported CPUs
MAXIMUS VI HERO Manual

I had the exact opposite experience with ASUS - with the exception of finding it difficult to get a return call when you leave a message, so I just kept calling them until I got a person. I described the problem, the troubleshooting and testing I had done and they asked me for my address info and immediately shipped a new motherboard to me. It looked new and has been running great ever since. This was about 3-4 years ago, and the mobd was in its 3rd year of a 3 year warranty when it died (bad capacitors). I have bought a bunch of ASUS products and since and haven’t needed customer service, so I don’t know if it has changed.

Not bad at all for the price, but if you’re considering using SLI, I wouldn’t go with this one. I would use one with two dedicated x16 slots for SLI so you’re not limiting your GFX cards.

Why wouldn’t you do the RMA with Amazon directly? They are usually great with returns.

FWIW, I have an Asus MAXIMUS V (predecessor) and it is fantastic for gamers & power users. These come with some awesome tools, like the ability to monitor your motherboard and rig with a secondary computer/laptop. This give a lot of control of all aspects.

I love the on-board power and reset switch. The onboard LED code display has been handy for troubleshooting. There’s also an easy CMOS reset button for if you’re tweaking settings and brick it.

I was going to mock the line in the specs that mention “6 SATA ports, red”, until I failed to find any of them in the image. Can anyone tell me where they are?

And for that matter, why does the motherboard have power and reset buttons on it (in the top-right corner in the main view)?

Every Asus “Rog” model had the on board switches. I assume it’s to cater to the hardcore overclocker who use their motherboard on a test bench or other enclosure that doesn’t have a traditional ATX switch setup.

The SATA ports are along the lower right side of the board. They are turned 90 degrees, so the connectors plug parallel to the board.

I’m using this board for SLI, the difference in performance between x8 and x16 is very minimal with current cards.

Here’s a post showing benchmark results on a similar Z87 board : http://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Impact-of-PCI-E-Speed-on-Gaming-Performance-518/

My own results concur with this, it doesn’t seem to matter.

If you do use it for SLI, bear in mind the slot spacing, you only have three slots of space between the cards, so some of the cards with the massive coolers won’t physically fit in a SLI/Crossfire configuration.

Past return period…