Connectors and I/O

Totally ASUS equipped the Maximus VII Formula with ten angled SATA ports, offering also two SATA Express ports. All ports offer 6Gbps bandwidth and six of them have been natively wired to the Z97 PCH. Two more are connected to an ASMedia SATA Express controller which can be used for data hard drives only. The last two ports also come from an ASMedia ASM1061 chip. Additionally there is an mPCIe combo port in the top left corner of the board with an M.2 socket supporting both SATA and PCI strorage devices. You'll also find practical onboard power- and reset-buttons on this board and there is a debug display. These buttons as well as the display can be found in the top right corner of the PCB. Another feature, that overclockers will like, is located above the DIMM slots. At this point you're going to find voltage readout points.


Totally you'll find eight fan header on the Maximus VII Formula which is more than enough, to provide a fully fledged system with fresh air. The fan header are located around the CPU socket, next to the DIMM slots and the bottom edge of the motherboard. ASUS decided to use 4-pin PWM headers in all eight cases. Therefore it is possible to adjust rotation speed in the BIOS or in Windows. ASUS equipped this board with their SupremeFX Formula 2014 audio solution. In this case the manufacturer isolated all the sound related components from the rest of the PCB. Apart from that there are high-quality ELNA capacitors as well as opamp's, which together should offer clearer and richer audio. When we connected the board to studio grade audio gear there was less interference noise audible.


Looking at the external connectors directly at the back-panel ASUS equipped the Maximus VII Formula with six USB 3.0/2.0 ports, only two USB 2.0/1.1 ports, one gigabit ethernet port, an HDMI connector, a DisplayPort output as well as an optical out and an analogue audio panel. Furtheremore you'll find also a clear CMOS button as well as an ROG Connect button.

Page 1 - Introduction	Page 14 - SiSoft Sandra 2
Page 2 - Specs and Delivery	Page 15 - UC Bench
Page 3 - Features	Page 16 - Super Pi 1M / 32M
Page 4 - Layout	Page 17 - wPrime 1024M Multi Core
Page 5 - Connectors and I/O	Page 18 - Cinebench
Page 6 - BIOS	Page 19 - Bioshock: Infinite
Page 7 - Test setup	Page 20 - Metro Last Light
Page 8 - Preview / Gallery	Page 21 - Sleeping Dogs
Page 9 - 3D Mark	Page 22 - Power Consumption
Page 10 - 3D Mark 11	Page 23 - Performance Rating
Page 11 - 3D Mark Vantage	Page 24 - Price Comparison
Page 12 - PC Mark 7	Page 25 - Conclusion
Page 13 - SiSoft Sandra 1