Hardware Asus Maximus VII Impact Review

One thing I miss from these reviews now are the detailed overclocking sections. But that's more a commentary on the simplicity of modern overclocking than anything else.

 

Looks like a very nice board. A toss up between one of these and the Z97N Gaming 5 however for what id use it for and the requirement for the better audio I think the Gigabyte has is for my pockets at the moment due to the cost of m.2. Can you boost from m.2 on this board or is it a case of an expensive storage drive?

 

any users ...what settings to make use of m.2 and is it worth the effort?

 

Thank you for this and it's about time! No, that isn't a dig at BT, just a reflection of how long I have been waiting for this... Although at a quick glance it is EXACTLY as expected.

Just starting to read through properly however and saw this on the first page:
'The amount of kit crammed onto the PC is even more extensive...'

Should that not be PCB?

Further down:
'along with Bluetooth 4.0 support and the read of the card offers an M.2 ...'

Rear of the card?

Not an error as such but I think this can read better:
'This uses a proprietary connector to plug into the PCB and provides an additional two 4-pin fan headers'

...and provides two additional 4-pin fan headers

And...
'As you'd expect with board at this price'

...with 'a' board / with boards...

And another 'a' missing:
'(this could be 'a' pain or not depending which case you used)'

Right... That's page 1...

P.S. I'll keep editing this single comment as I see anything I think is an error.

 

"we use Prime95 to stress the CPU to its limits, putting all eight cores of our Core i7-4770K test CPU under load and allowing the power readout to level off"

Thats a quad core chip guys

Also for the M.2 testing get a Samsung XP941, I get over a gig read speeds with it :

 

I got dragged away so haven't been able to read the rest... YET!

 

Nice...

Almost makes me want to build a baby brother for my desktop Corsair 450D Maximus VII Hero rig in a Corsair 250D to keep it company.

...almost.

 

Baby brother? The Hero and Ranger although "Rog" are not actually Rog boards, they are more like standard boards with the Rog look and some features.

The only current "Rog" boards at the moment are the Crosshair, Impact, Formula and the Rampage Extreme.

Build with that ITX and itll be the big brother to the 450D that suffers from small angry man syndrome!

 

..my rig has just been insulted.

..benchmarks at dawn to restore honour.

 

Nah... not enough. I got the cheaper Z97i-Plus and it works great for me. I can do without a couple extra fan headers and some fancy red paints. The audio isn't that bad either.

Few years back though, I'll be swiping my credit card...

 

While this is no doubt a fantastic board it just doesn't offer enough to justify the extra cash... a LOT of extra cash. At £150 it is arguably worth it but certainly not at £170-£175. M.2 is nice but not a deal maker/breaker and while it is nice to see advanced audio, it seems an external audio card offers far more value, especially as you can then migrate that to a new build unlike the daughter card of the Impact.

I actually feel rather disappointed... lower priced boards offer almost the same performance with very few features missing and we're not talking about £10-£20 differences here. To compare prices from SCAN, the Impact VII is £175.20 compared to the excellent MSI Z97I GAMING AC's £101.96... a massive 42% cheaper.

I am going to have to think long and hard about which of these boards I want to get. I have been dreaming of the Impact VII for a long time and the MSI feels like a massive compromise, but that price is difficult to justify. I hope BT have a review of the MSI Z97I GAMING AC coming soon to help me decide.

Thanks again BT for the article.

 

For me, this board doesn't justify the £75 premium over the likes of a Z97I-Plus. If it were an extra ten or twenty percent more expensive then sure, but at a 75% premium over a £100 motherboard? Even if we ignore the relative price difference, £175 for motherboard is really quite stupidly expensive for the vast majority of people.

Then again, £100 for a Z97 motherboard when you could get a "lesser" chipset board for half that price... I don't mind the idea that enthusiasts will pay more for quality, but I think we're all guilty of valuing features over benefits, and for me, this board may have loads of features but it just doesn't offer enough in the way of real-world benefits to justify the price.

 

Glad to see this review at last.
At a glance it looks just like the Impact VI, other than the eSATA has been replaced by a PS2 port, which does look odd where there are no legacy graphics ports!
It is expensive, but is does have things on it that aren't found elsewhere in ITX.
BUT, what bawjaws says is hard to argue with. If you can get a good OC with Z97I-Plus or the MSI Z97I GAMING AC, the benefit of the extra power phases at a lot more cost are called into question. The sound card and combo M2/WiFi may be handy but not earth shattering.
I was looking at the Z97I-Plus / GA Z97N Gaming 5 / MSI Z97I GAMING AC for ages and then managed to find a used Impact VI locally for under £100, so jumped at that.
Previously, I was looking for a P8Z77-I DELUXE at around £70 and there were none to be had.
So, the playing field seems to have flattened out on performance, unless you HAVE to have the 'best' most loaded board.
Maybe this proves the adage 'just because you can do something, it doesn't mean you have to'.
The ROG premium is lovely on the toys and looks front but the competition have a lot to offer at a lot less money. ROG was never cheap tho' /2p

 

I've been waiting for this BT review! Thanks. Another great job from Asus and the price of the Impact should be coming down soon enough, especially with the new X99 chipset out (I bought my Impact for just over £160).

I've ordered this mobo to fit in a Corsair Carbide 240 with the H100i. One question I do have is regarding the M.2 card sharing bandwidth with the PCIe slot;

http://www.asus.com/uk/Motherboards/MAXIMUS_VII_IMPACT/specifications

Is the decrease in GPU bandwidth from x16 to x8 such a big deal?

 

X99 doesn't replace Z97 so how do you work that out? Price will remain until Z97 is actually replaced.

 

Nope, not a big deal at all:

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GTX_980_PCI-Express_Scaling/21.html