Asus Maximus XI Formula
Turning the features – and price – right up to XI.
Asus has been churning out ROG motherboards since 2006 and here we are with the 11th iteration of the venerable Maximus.
A visual inspection of the board clearly shows that Asus is targeting water cooling users with the Formula. The VRM is cooled by an EK waterblock while we counted seven fan headers plus additional water cooling specific headers.
Of course there’s plenty of RGB onboard as you’d expect, but the most eye-catching feature is the LiveDash OLED panel. It can be used to display various monitoring information or even your own custom image or animation. It’s really cool. The storage features consist of an average set of six SATA ports and a pair of M.2 slots. There’s also a quality metal backplate. This is a really heavy motherboard that’s built like a battleship.
The I/O area has an integrated shield and is chock full of ports. There’s four USB 3.1 ports, one of which is a Type-C, along with six USB 3.0 ports. Along with the standard audio ports, there’s a single HDMI port, BIOS flashback and CMOS clear buttons. Now we come to those dual LAN ports. One of them is connected to an Intel I219V Gigabit controller, while the other uses an Aquantia 5G controller. Slowly we’re starting to see the winds of change, with infrastructure faster than ancient Gigabit LAN becoming more commonplace. We’re very happy to see 5G included on the Maximus XI Formula. AC Wi-Fi is common on high end boards these days, but not necessarily the faster 1.73Gbps speed we have here. The Maximus XI Formula is definitely a networking powerhouse.
Asus’ ROG UEFI BIOS is little changed from previous generations. Users familiar with Asus BIOS will be right at home, however it can be a bit overwhelming at times for inexperienced users. Users wanting to extract every fraction of performance will be right at home with the extensive memory tweaking options, profiles to try and a million other tweaks to play with.
Performance is bang on where we expected. It proved to be quite strong with graphics applications, though as we thought, the differences between all the boards in the test are very minor. The board didn’t raise a sweat when it came to our CPU and memory overclocking tests. CPU cooling limitations present themselves long before the board gets stressed.
The Asus Maximus XI Formula comes across as a really refined board that’s tailor made for watercoolers and modders looking to show off their rigs. We love the OLED panel, cooling options, build quality and networking prowess. There’s no doubt it’s a pricey proposition but it’s the kind of price that’s justified thanks to its unique and innovative feature set.