Asus ROG Maximus XI Formula – VRM cooling by EKWB

In Deus Ex at both 4K and 1080p there is very little to separate one motherboard from another. Nonetheless, the Asus performs and a win is a win.

By contrast in Middle Earth the Asus crashes down the chart. The margins of difference are absolutely tiny, but still, this is unexpected.

Our chart shows the CPU Game fps results in the Shadow of the Tomb Raider, rather than pure fps. You can see a fair spread of results between the motherboards and Asus does relatively poorly.

Performance and Overclocking Overview.
Overclocking our Intel Engineering Sample Core i9-9900K has never been much fun as the absolute limit has proven to be 5.1GHz with temperatures getting distinctly uncomfortable at 5.0GHz. The AI Overclocking section of the Asus BIOS predicted a maximum speed of 4.9GHz with a Vcore of 1.279V, which is certainly in the correct ballpark if you want to keep temperatures at a sensible limit.

We hit a snag with Load Line Calibration. We raised LLC from level 2 to level 7 (maximum is level 8) and found the Vcore drooped by 50mV under load, which forced us to raise Vcore in the BIOS from 1.30V to 1.35V. This allowed us to raise the clock multiplier to 50x for 5.0GHz on all cores which was stable but toasty, however it is also clear this is only an incremental improvement over the Auto setting of 4.7GHz on all cores.

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