ASUS ROG Maximus V Gene (Z77) Review - Ivy Bridge on Phase Change

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First established almost five years ago, Asus's Republic of Gamers team has grown from strength to strength, improving on their offerings generation after generation by recruiting the best engineering talents and support personnel in the industry, to build a premium brand on top of their regular channel products. Billed as an "Micro ATX Z77 gaming board", the Maximus V Gene (M5G) actually has better all-round credentials than most other full-sized motherboards out there.

Bundle wise, the M5G comes with the mandatory manual and driver CD, SATA cables, SLI Bridge, a USB cable for the remote ROG Connect feature and sticky labels for cable management.

The micro ATX M5G is endowed with boyish good looks, with the signature ROG black and red colour theme a standout in most enclosures or open-air test benches.

At the rear I/O panel, we get an abundance of USB ports (including four USB 3.0 and one white designated port for BIOS flashback/ROG Connect), Gigabit Ethernet, eSATA, gold-plated audio jacks for 8-channel audio and HDMI/DisplayPort for onboard Intel HD graphics. There are also pin-outs on the left meant for the mSATA/PCIe combo adapter, flanked by easy access buttons for CMOS Reset and ROG Connect.

For LAN connectivity the M5G relies on an Intel 82579V Gigabit Ethernet PHY, typically found on higher end motherboard offerings.

A pair of PCIe ASMedia controllers (ASM1042 and ASM1442) supplies additional SATA and USB 3.0 (fast charge and UASP too) connectivity on top of those from the Z77 Panther Point PCH.

The SupremeFX III audio solution is actually built on a Realtek codec, with metal EMI shielding, refined audio capacitors and optimized grounding bringing the rated SNR to a decent 110dB. We didn't do any formal testing but it definitely sounded better than most muddy onboard solutions.

Read more: ASUS ROG Maximus V Gene (Z77) Review - Ivy Bridge on Phase Change by VR-Zone.com

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A handy PORT-80 diagnostic LED is placed next to six SATA ports, of which four of them are of 6Gb/s signalling speed (two from the Z77 PCH, two from a ASMedia ASM1061).





The expansion slot configuration on this board is fairly straightforward, with a pair of PCIe 3.0 SLI/CrossfireX capable x16 slots (electrically x16 or x8+x and a solidary PCIe 2.0 x4 slot for graphic cards and other uses. Onboard Power/Reset buttons located at the bottom are useful for users running from open-air test beds.





No surprises or potential electrical short hazards behind the board.





The M5G can also gain Thunderbolt connectivity via a separately sold PCIe expansion card (known as ThunderboltEX), which takes up a PCIe x4 slot and connects to a designated header on the motherboard for power and bios signalling. A DisplayPort cable is also provided to allow DP signals to be encapsulated on the Thunderbolt data stream for display purposes.

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From this section onwards, our readers will see that the M5G is no run-of-the-mill mATX offering, but actually a very capable platform for extreme overclocking scenarios.



Unlike the bottom barrel components usually deployed on SFF motherboards, the CPU 8+4 phase (CPU and Uncore) VRM setup is virtually identical to the one found on the more prestigious Maximus V Extreme, which speaks volumes about its intent. An 8-pin EPS connector also supply a large current to the CPU.





TrenchMOS FETs are used here, with NXP 7030AL on the high and NXP 5030AL on the low side,. Each pair is capable of 53A @ 100C, more than enough for any kind of overclocking.





Like on recent boards, ASUS's industry leading DIGI+ PWMs (rebranded CHiLs) are capable of very precise digital control and monitoring of the MOSFETs to prevent unhappy blue smoke accidents during intense loads.







Voltage probe points for the common overclocking parameters are provided here, although we would have preferred them to be socketed so that they can be hooked up to a multimeter for extended monitoring. Pressing the red GO button on the left also allows a user-defined overclocking profile to be loaded during boot time.

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To gain access to more overclocking presets and turn off warning messages when using higher than Intel recommended voltages, we must put a jumper on a set of pins on top of the ones marked TB_HEADER to unlock the secret LN2 mode.



The functional UEFI BIOS layout on the board is an ROG themed variant of the ones found on ASUS boards since the P67 era, providing a well partitioned and verbose GUI for stress-free tuning. Once the secret LN2 mode is activated, hidden profiles meant for subzero experimentations are available for selection. Recovery from bad overclocks is spot on, with a quick power cycle bringing the board back to previous stable settings without any theatrics.





Common and not-so-common voltage options are present for enthusiasts to mess around, with values colour coded to indicate the level of danger.





The elusive Xtreme Tweaking and SPI Booster options help tighten internal timings to give the board the edge over its competitors in some benchmarks.





Thanks to its DIGI+ PWM controllers, the BIOS is well endowed with settings to control LLC, switching frequencies and over-current capability, giving users a choice between eco power saving and environmentally irresponsible overclocking dexterity. Because we are VR-Zone, this review will focus on the latter.





The DRAM tweaking section is fairly comprehensive as well, with memory presets provided for common DDR3 chipsets as a good starting point for further tuning.







Typically found only on high-end motherboards, there are skew and drive options to squeeze every bit of performance out of the CPU and memory.





BIOS profiles are retained across CMOS reset but not after a flash upgrade.





Since the recent BIOS releases, ASUS has worked on its much criticized boot-up speed of their motherboards by tweaking PNP device initialization during POST. The controversial Windows 8 Secure Boot support has also been added to qualify their boards for official Microsoft certification.

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We have mentioned about ASUS's polarizing AI Suite utility several times before in our previous reviews, with the main criticism being the size of the installation package (160MB+) which can be a showstopper when downloading over a slow Internet connection. That aside, the user interface is largely clean and unobtuse, with most tunables applied without any noticable delay or the need for operating system reboot.

A lot of overclockers we know prefer the minimalist GUI approach of Gigabyte's TweakLauncher or EVGA's E-Leet which are devoid of fancy graphic effects and excessive sensor polling that will affect benchmark scores.






To woo the gaming crowd, ASUS has included two Software QOS utilities (Network iControl and ROG GameFirst) for network gaming traffic prioritization. Not sure if its prudent to run both of them at the same time though.







The included ROG Mem TweakIt utility allows expert level adjustment of primary and secondary memory timings, and has a useful function to calculate the efficiency of your changes.





Another very cool feature is the Formula 1-ish mobile telemetry that is made possible by ROG Connect, allowing control and monitoring of BIOS settings remotely (i.e on another machine) without incurring any CPU interrupts.







Like most other Z77 boards, a Lucid Virtu MVP license is included in the package, allowing for the IGP to work in tandem with discreet GPU for Quick Sync and energy saving. Recent updates also add HyperFormance support for current games like Battlefield 3 and Diablo 3, and we will be testing out its touted benefits again in a later feature piece.

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Our Maximus V GENE test system consists of a Intel Ivy Bridge i7-3770K cooled with a single stage phase change (capable of maintaining temps between -40 to -55 degree celcius), a pair of AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz cards and dual 4GB Samsung DDR3 sticks.



One of the best memory for use on the Ivy Bridge platform right now is the (literally) low profile Samsung Green 4GB 1.35v 1600MHz CL11, available on NewEgg at US$46.99 for a 2 x 4GB kit. When driven with high voltages (1.7v+), these modules are capable of over 2400MHz frequency with fairly tight latencies, giving more illustrious and expensive contemporaries from the likes of G.Skill and Corsair a run for their money.





Highest CPU frequency achieved on our phase change unit was 5691MHz (single threaded), with the BCLK operating at an impressive 111.6MHz. This very same CPU couldn't do more than 108MHz on our other motherboards, testament to the amount of work that went into the signal tweaking of the M5G.





Memory overclocking was also brilliant, with our US$46.99 Samsung kit doing a tight dual channel DDR-2442 @ 9-12-12-21 1T. At these aggressive settings, synthetic memory reads were in excess of 25GB/s for reads and 26GB/s for writes, almost double the bandwidth of the Samsung modules with default SPD settings.





Some other benchmarks:

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Conclusion



Price: US$194.99 (Newegg) / SGD$335 (PC Themes)

We don't think any of the sub-US$200 Socket 1155 motherboards in the market today has attention to detail as the Maximus V Gene that we have reviewed today. The amount of tunables for maximizing your Ivy Bridge CPU and memory overclock is as good as it gets and the motherboard should please both the gamers and enthusiasts that it was designed for. Most users can also live with the micro ATX form factor, since the mainstream Z77 platform was never meant for more than two way multi-GPU anyway.

Just for the sake of fault finding, the lack of a PS/2 port and Wifi/Bluetooth support prevents the Maximus V Gene from getting a perfect score in our books.