 As Asus' highest-end ROG Z97 motherboard, the Maximus 7 formula has all the bells and- Wait, what? Sorry, it's not supposed to come with any bells or whistles. This is a piece of computer hardware, not a summer camp counselor preparedness kit. Cooler Master V-series semi-modular power supplies feature 80 plus gold efficiency and their gold guarantee 5-year warranty. Click now to learn more. Obviously, I meant figurative bells and whistles. With CPU performance pretty much equal across every motherboard running a given chipset, Asus' approach to justifying the high price of a formula-grade ROG board is a bit of a waste of time. Let's find out if they succeeded. First, a physical tour. It starts with the eye-catching plastic ROG armor plate on the front of the board, an attractive, if not particularly functional feature, and a steel backplate, something that may actually save you a lot of money. If you have a tendency to accidentally scratch the backs of your boards on motherboard standoffs. The LGA 1150 socket is powered by an 8 plus 4-pin connector setup, although you only really need to plug in one of them. And thanks to the new improved Digi Plus 8-phase power design, it performs optimally with any Intel CPU. RAM is a similar story with digital power delivery and support for up to 3300 MHz DDR3 RAM in dual channel. We're talking DDR4 type range speed here. Onboard tweaker-friendly dials include on-board power, reset, memo, KBOT, and soundstage buttons. More on those last two later. And finally, to go along with a header for their external overclocking, there are built-in voltage checkpoints, although I prefer the implementations of some other manufacturers who include multimeter-friendly adapters, instead of relying on my steady hands to get a reading. Moving further down, the storage config of this board is super premium in some ways, with dual SATA Express slots, one from the Intel chipset and a second-as-media-powered one, each of which can become two SATA 3 slots for a total of 10, and yet kind of lacking in others, with no rear eSATA. And while it has an M.2 slot on the MPCIe combo 3 thing that comes preloaded with a Bluetooth and dual-band AC wireless card, the aforementioned M.2 only works with short-style drives due to clearance issues with the ROG Armor. Maybe that's why ASUS also sent over their Hyper M.2 X4 expansion card that just plugs into a PCIe slot, something that's an extra for this board. It's not something that I'm likely to use soon, with M.2 drives not being that plentiful and not really offering a tangible performance benefit yet, but they also have other expansion options available, such as their Thunderbolt 2 module that works on all of their Z97 boards, including this one. Would love to get my hands on one of those. PCIe Gen 3 expansion is handled by three PCIe 1x slots, two PCIe 16x slots that are split to 8x, 8x when both are in use, and a final PCIe 4x slot that can be used for a graphics card and three-way crossfire, but unfortunately isn't usable for three-way SLI. Now, three-way graphics configurations are not something that I really encourage anyway, but I feel like for someone dropping almost $400 on a motherboard these days, it should probably at least be an option. Anyway, under these slots is ASUS' best onboard audio implementation yet. High-quality DACs and premium audio-grade capacitors aren't exactly new, but what is new with the 2014 edition of their SupremeFX audio solution is the ability to amplify your games and music and provide a great listening experience no matter where you plug into, which with the number of people using front-panel audio connectors is a great step forward. Now let's take a quick look at the rear panel with its useful clear CMOS button, abundance of USB 3 ports, and some people won't care about this, but I do, PS2 port. Before moving on to the features and extras that ASUS feels will help this product justify its high price compared to the more basic options that are also available for DIY PC builders. First up is the best onboard fan control setup I've yet seen on a motherboard. It's got eight sensibly positioned fan headers with what has become standard on ASUS boards, individual control of either PWM or DC fans via curves that can be adjusted according to onboard or manually positioned temp sensors. Awesome. Next up is KeyBot, an onboard chip that sits electrically between your USB port and your keyboard and allows you to remap your F keys to other keys, macros, functions like media playback, or program shortcuts. The UI isn't particularly intuitive, but once you set it up, it actually seems to work pretty well. When you toggle it on and off, this can be done in software or with an onboard button for some reason, there's a bit of a delay, longer the first time, but nothing horrible. It actually works. On to sound features, man are there a lot of these. First is their sonic radar, which puts a visual representation of where noises are coming from on the screen. It lets you adjust opacity and turn it on or off for different games with profiles. Next, they've got their sound stage hardware level EQ presets. They only work on the front panel audio, and if you live in a bizarre universe, you can press an onboard button to toggle them and use the post LED to see if you're in FPS or sports mode or whatever, or if you're a normal person, you can change them in the control panel, where you'll actually find a lot more stuff that I don't really use, like artificial reverb effects, smart EQ, and virtual surround. The good news is that within the panel, there's also a ton of useful stuff like a software EQ, DTS settings, and their voice clarity feature to make in-game communications pop a little bit more and be easier to hear. In summary, the hardware of the audio on this board is great. I mean, it even auto-detects the impedance of your headphones when you plug them in and adjust the output accordingly. But there are some dials in the software that many purists would never touch. Thankfully, they have a test feature so you can do A-B listening to see what sounds best for you. I really wish they'd add a few more different sample audio tracks, so that would make it a little bit more useful. On to game-first networking. The features in here are really cool, and for a long time, I actually had a Killer Nick K1 installed in my personal system, just to be able to meter bandwidth or prioritize traffic between applications. So this, being powered by an Intel chipset instead of a Bigfoot one, should be much better. But I've had a fair bit of trouble with network connections working correctly with AiSuite and Game First installed over the years, and unfortunately, this time around is no exception, with my network connection sometimes taking five to even fifteen minutes to start working correctly whenever I unplug it. The saving grace is that once it is running, it works like awesome though, so your mileage may vary. Let me know in the comments how Game First is working for you, if you have an ASUS motherboard. And finally, we've got their CrossChill Copper Air-slash-Water VRM cooler. And with this, I think they finally nailed it, mostly. Like last gen, it's got G1 quarter threads so I can use my own fittings, but this time we get copper internals so I'm not mixing any metals in my loop. Way to go, ASUS. The only issue left is making sure that there's enough clearance for large compressions for the people who like those, but my preferred 3-eighths inch thick wall ones fit just fine, so this is a total non-issue for me. Two thumbs up. In the real world with a 4770K, switching from air to water let me go from 66 degrees to 56 degrees on the VRM center in AI Suite, but I feel like that sensor isn't really positioned to be truly representative of the difference because the board feels much more cooler than that to the touch. Which leads us to conclusion time. Is the Maximus 7 formula a luxury item or is it a practical purchase? I mean, you do get some software extras like Kaspersky, Antivirus, Demon Tools Pro, and a full copy of Watch Dogs. Yes, it's better built and looks a lot nicer than the other stuff, and you do get those little ROG extras like additional support over the longer term, but while I do see more value in a high-end board these days now that generational CPU performance improvements from Intel are so small that you're likely to get a few generations out of it, I also think the same could be said about Asus' Z97 Pro, which is available for a little over half the price. So the bottom line is, yes, it's a luxury item, but at least it's a cool one. Guys, like this video if you liked it, dislike it if you disliked it, leave a comment letting me know if you have any suggestions for future videos or comments that are more complicated than liking or disliking or whatever else. Check out the link in the video description to support us. 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