Asus Maximus IV Gene-Z Motherboard review (mATX)

The Asus Maximum IV Gene Z board is a UEFI driven configuration, which immediately earns it bonus points. We love the new UEFI interface driven menus. The motherboard had no problems detecting and working with our Intel Core i7 2600k processor. While this will be great for newbies, bios gurus will want to skip the basic screen and enter into advanced mode.

Advanced mode opens up a whole new array of tabbed panels for fine tuning and overclocking. The Main panel gives a basic overview of the bios revision, system, processor and date and time.

The advanced panel offers device configuration as well as panels to allow adjustments to the iROG configuration

The monitor panel is self explanatory, giving access to various panels for monitoring voltage and temperatures.

The Boot menu offers adjustments to the boot configuration, including the priority of the hard drives or SSD drives installed.

There are a variety of voltage settings for the user to tweak and adjust, to enhance overclocking capabilities and stability.

The GPU.DIMM post option is extremely useful as we can check on the graphics card status. Above we have shown two pictures of the system with a single, and then two graphics cards installed.

Voltage settings are extensive, this will really hit the spot with the overclocking enthusiast audience.

There are many preset overclocking options in this board, which takes away the problems of working out voltages and settings, by using a table of pre-generated configurations based around the identity of the processor currently installed.

The Artificial intelligence overclocking section of the bios gives automatic, manual, or X.M.P. overclocked settings. by simple menu options. Additionally, the CPU level up button gives several presets for the Core i7 2600k – 4.2ghz and 4.6ghz.

For this review we will be showing results from the prebuilt 4.6ghz setting built into this bios. Manually we achieved around 4.8ghz with high end air cooling (more is possible but high grade water cooling would be needed), much like any other enthusiast grade board we have reviewed recently.

The Corsair memory we are using was detected as 1333mhz memory with 9-9-9 timings. So we manually adjusted it to 1600mhz with 7-7-7 timings, which are the recommended settings. Other memory we tested (rated at 9-9-9) detected fine without manual adjustments. It is worth paying attention to this configuration in case your memory is running under specification.

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