 Buy a qualifying Intel product and get entered in the Intel Dynamic Ticket Giveaway for a chance to win great prizes. Visit IntelGamingPromo.com to learn more. Welcome to my unboxing of the Maximus 6 Formula from Asus. This is probably out of all the Z87 boards, the one that I can really look at and go, yes, there is a very compelling value here for this high-end board because it includes things that I personally believe in very strongly and that is a nice high-end Intel NIC solution with prioritization. With that said, that's included on a lot of the other Asus boards, but where it really gets real for me, so to speak, on their formula grade boards is the onboard audio solution. So here they have a bunch of stuff that may or may not mean anything to you. So Elna premium audio capacitors, audio capacitors are not necessarily the same as regular capacitors. You can have a great capacitor that's not necessarily fantastic for audio applications. So they've also got, what else do they have to say about themselves here? Supreme FX shielding, EMI protection cover, differential design with premium op amps, premium op amps is definitely important here. Lima film capacitors, Lima rather, sorry, Cirrus Logic CS 4398 DAC and they also have a TPA 6120A2 600 ohm hi-fi headphone amp. So Asus' whole thing with their onboard audio solutions is that it's more than the sum of the parts. Now they do list out all the parts for you spec heads that really want to know what's in there, but what they're trying to do and they're using a lot of the experience that they get from their Zonar cards is they're trying to deliver a balanced configuration right out of the box. Now there are competitors that are offering features such as swappable op amps on their onboard solutions, but it should be noted that per a thread on the audio section of the Linus Tech Tips forum, swappable op amps isn't necessarily a good thing. You shouldn't necessarily even want to swap out your op amps because the rest of the system was designed around the one that it was designed to run with. And it's kind of like you could put a thousand horsepower engine in a Volkswagen Beetle, but you probably shouldn't because it will likely tear the axles off if you actually tried to go anywhere in it. So it's that kind of thing and it's less extreme than that, but I think you guys get my point. In terms of accessories, we've got a full kit, not quite as extreme as the Maximus 6 Extreme, which makes a lot of sense. There's a manual with some useless disks inside, although you got a sweet looking ROG sticker in there, so don't throw that away while you're throwing away the disk. An SLI bridge with their awesome Republic of Gamers branding, flexible black, perfect SLI bridge. Good job Asus. Q connectors, a door hanger, enter champion to break and do not disturb it champion in action. I think they got a bit of a champion to break. I think they meant on break, but whatever. We've got an antenna for the built in wireless AC as well as their combo card that I personally really like, so it includes both wireless and an NGFF slot so that you can install a mini SSD that'll actually interface with PCI Express rather than with a SATA interface like you would on an M-SATA, because on a desktop, let's face it, what is the point of installing an M-SATA SSD? It doesn't perform any better. It's just you have lots of room. Next up, we've got the I.O. Shield as well as eight serial ATA 3 cables, four of which are right angle, four of which are straight and those little handy ROG labels for your SATA cables so you don't lose track of what's going where and why and how. As you guys may or may not have noticed, this is one sexy motherboard. Both B-roll and I are in agreement that out of everything we've looked at so far, this has got to be the best looking motherboard we've encountered. They've even done a few things that I think are just exceptional. So I want to point those out right off the bat. So number one is their ROG Armor, so there is a top plate as well as a back plate. Now the back plate is actually the one I'm a little bit more interested in because it is metal and it has some definite functionality. So number one is it increases the rigidity of the board overall. So if you were to over torque any screws such as when you're installing your CPU heatsink, the board is less likely to bow and flex. And the other thing about it is that the name armor is appropriate because it is not that uncommon for people to accidentally install an extra standoff in the back of their motherboard tray or anything like that that can actually ruin your board and cut traces on the back of your board if you don't realize it in time. This will actually prevent that from happening in most cases because it will just hit the armor. So there you go, that's really cool. On the front it's a plastic shroud and Asus themselves admitted to me that it's more for aesthetics than anything else. With that said, it does a fantastic job of what it's trying to do which is improve the aesthetics of the board. This one is plastic. They've also said that while they have observed a slight temperature improvements, particularly in certain areas like around the PCI Express slots where a lot of the time those graphics cards are going to be kicking off more heat than the motherboard itself. So it actually serves to shield the motherboard from the heat of other components more than help the motherboard cool itself in that case. But other than that, it doesn't really do too much in terms of cooling on this particular motherboard's implementation. Next up is their cross chill. Now I really like the way that they've used these stylized rubber plugs here as opposed to just having the barb stick out on the last generation board and then having little rubber plugs that are easy to get lost. So this allows you to run the board either completely passively with supplemental air cooling with something like an Antec Spot Cool or by putting your own G1 quarter fittings on here and integrating it into your custom loop. With that said, unless you're running an anti-corrosive additive such as ethylene glycol, I probably wouldn't recommend running this particular thing in your loop because it does have aluminum internals as opposed to copper internals. And depending on who you ask, of course aluminum can be fine in this or that case and it's probably going to be okay and it probably will. But I've seen enough problems with corrosion eating away at aluminum components inside water cooling loops that it is not something that I would personally feel comfortable using unless I had a good anti-corrosive additive. So if you use something like Swift Tech Hydrix, then you're going to be golden. Now let's start with the overall tour of the board. Up here in the top we find that NGFF MPCIe combo 2 port where we can put our wireless module as well as an NGFF or M2 SSD. We've got a fan header, a 4-pin and 8-pin power connector. So while it's not the Maximus 6 Extreme which includes their OC panel, it's OC panel compatible and it's certainly extreme overclocking compatible. I mean, again, not necessarily quite to the same extent as the Maximus 6 Extreme although it does support some cool stuff including their GPU hotwire which allows you to overvolt ASUS GPUs that support the feature on this particular board. It has their Memo K button which allows you to diagnose post errors that are caused by memory not really working correctly, V checkpoints as well as an onboard post readout, start and reset switches built in. There's something I wanted to draw your attention to. It's over here. I was looking for it there. It's got their patent pending 4-pin, 3-pin and detecting CPU fan connector. So it'll actually automatically configure your fan control which of course it has their latest fan control software which you can access through FanExpert. FanExpert 2 I believe is the iteration we're on which you can access through AI Suite allowing you to have full control of every fan that is plugged into the board. But anyway, this one will detect on its own with no intervention from the user. Four dual channel DDR3 ports as well as an LGA 1150 socket supporting the latest Haswell fourth generation Intel processors. Of course as you'll find on any ROG board the VRM is pretty much as high end as ASUS can build. So this is their DigiPlus Gen3 Extreme Engine so you can configure anything you'd want from within the BIOS to a very minute degree of accuracy. On the right hand edge we find the 24-pin exactly where it belongs. Would have liked to see that front USB 3 connector on a right angle. That's one thing where I think this board could still be improved. We've got 6 SATA 3, 6 gigabit per second ports running off the Intel chipset and 4 SATA 3, 6 gigabit per second ports running off of an additional chipset. This is a feature that's a carryover from the Extreme board. So it actually supports fast boot on or off when you're particularly under sub-zero temperatures you might not necessarily want it to boot up as quickly so you can actually turn fast boot off. We've got our front panel connectors as well as our front panel USB 2 header. Only a single USB 2 header on this board. That's very interesting. There's that proprietary connector for the OC panel, the Thunderbolt header to add Thunderbolt support to the board with an optional accessory, trusted platform module, auxiliary power for multiple graphics cards although it should be noted that this board only supports 2-way SLI or up to 3-way crossfire so that'll be running in 16x mode for a single card, 8x, 8x for dual cards or 8x, 4x, 4x for triple cards and Nvidia doesn't support SLI operation on PCIe 4x slots. This is something that's kind of cool. Check this out you guys. So ASUS has actually left open-ended PCI Express slots on all the PCIe 1x slots so if you were to remove the thermal armor, which you can, you would be able to install longer cards without any modding which I think is pretty handy. So anyway if you wanted to install more than 2 graphics cards I would recommend using the easy plug right here. We've got our front panel audio connector in its ideal location on the bottom left of the board as well as that red line audio separation for the completely separate PCB. So it's completely separate from the rest of the PCB. It's as isolated as their old SupremeFX implementations where they had a separate PCIe riser card except that it's built into the motherboard itself. So talking to JJ from ASUS he said one of the tough questions that he always gets is well, what is a great onboard audio solution equivalent to in terms of an add-in card? And he was saying if you go to like a lesser board such as the Maximus VI Hero for example, you're getting what's probably equivalent to something like a Zonar DG or DGX so about a $35 audio solution. With this you're probably getting something that's a little bit closer to a Zonar DX or about an $80 audio solution which from my experience is going to be enough for most people who don't have like a golden audio file ear and you're of course going to get things like their on-screen radar heads up display that shows you where the audio sounds are coming from. I actually asked JJ about this as well. I was like has that been banned yet from Tournament Play? He's like I'm sure that no tournament's going to allow you to use it but apparently it hasn't been formally banned yet. It's meant more for I think the casuals playing at home than for Tournament Play definitely. Okay so we've got eight four pin fan connectors. One two three four five six seven eight and actually they're very very well laid out so that you're going to be able to plug in kind of some you know top fans such as in something like a Corsair 800D. You got a couple rear fans, you got your CPU fan header and then you'll be able to plug in something at the front of the case and or the bottom so very thoughtful layout on that particular aspect of this board. I think that's getting pretty close to the end here so let's move around to the back where we've got ROG Connect. Ah yes the ROG Connect button even though the cable's not included it does still feature that functionality so you can hook it up to an external computer or laptop to control all of your overclocking settings at a hardware level. So the cable you'll have to get on your own but the functionality is still there. BIOS flashback four USB 2.0 ports, six USB 3.0 ports, DisplayPort HDMI, optical audio out gigabit LAN provided by Intel as well as 7.1 audio out. Oh it should be noted that's a 1217V Intel gigabit LAN chip that is powering that right there. Thank you for checking out my unboxing and overview of the Maximus 6 formula from Asus. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings reviews and other computer videos. Like this video if you liked it, dislike it if you disliked it and leave me a comment if you'd like me to read it because I do genuinely read the comments. Except yours. Not yours. No I do.