ASUS Maximus X Formula
We’ve been taken to 10th-gen heaven.
Formula boards are the kings of ASUS’s consumer lineup. Consider it a luxury and the 10th iteration of this design ethos has lead to this: a $639 masterpiece of connectivity, rear I/O, BIOS, liquid-cooling, and armour-plated PCB. And it looks marvellous.
That thermal armour — which was introduced with the TUF series, way back in the Z77 era — is hardly a new concept, and whether it actually reduces overall stress and temps on the PCB is still highly debated. That said, there’s no denying just how impressive this thing feels in your hands.
RGB lighting is subtle, with only four illuminated zones: the now-standard one baked into the rear I/O cover, one outlining the integrated on-board power and restart buttons, one embedded into the chipset heatsink, and the last ones at the ends of each PCIe slot, to give them a little extra pop. It’s quite a departure from the trend we’ve seen over the last few chipsets, and it’s far less gaudy.
There’s good reason for that. The Formula’s true party piece is the OLED display fixed to the middle, just south of the CPU socket. At boot, this small two-inch hexagonal panel shows off the BIOS debug codes your system’s cycling through. It’s on login, however, where things get more interesting: Using ASUS’s LiveDash software, you can show any number of useful statistics, from CPU temps to voltages, clock speeds, and fan RPMs. If you’re feeling fancy, you can throw your favourite GIF on there, or an ASUS logo, all pre-programmed into the LiveDash.
Then, of course, we get to performance. Overall, the Maximus X Formula performs well. Cinebench R15 scored a respectable 1,414 points, with the remainder of our CPU rendering tests falling in line with our other results. One thing that did catch our eye, however, was the seemingly excessive power draw under load. At stock, performing our standard looping 3DMark Fire Strike Extended test, we saw power scores clock up all the way to 333W. Now, that’s not huge, not when you think about how taxing that benchmark is, but given the fact it’s been some time since we’ve looked in detail at a Z370 motherboard, it was the stark contrast to its AMD counterparts that really caught our eye — it’s 55W higher than the same test on our Crosshair VI Hero with the Ryzen 7 1800X. As that has an additional two cores, it just goes to show how much Intel is struggling with this latest generation of chips.
On top of that, ASUS boards still have problems with the auto CPU voltage being way too high at stock. Registering temperatures as high as 72°C under load with a 360mm AIO, it certainly doesn’t feel too comfortable. That said, it does mean you can just throw a ratio at it and be pretty happy. We managed a clean 5GHz without even touching any other settings, although it was drawing 1.3V. Auto-overclock that yourself, and you can get it as low as 1.22V without throttling the chip.