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Overclocking

The Formula Maximus Special Edition is a pretty good overclocking board - even without water cooling.

No matter how hard I tried, I could not get the FSB stable at above 490MHz (1960MHz data rate); so a 2000MHz FSB is out of reach for us. But before it seems like I am complaining, 490MHz is a very good FSB to reach - especially since Intel is selling the X38 chipset as a 1333MHz chipset (never mind that it was supposedly originally designed for 1600MHz FSB, which now is reserved for the upcoming X48 chipset) - and 1600MHz FSB was rock solid, and easy to reach.

The DDR2 performance was decent, however the P35 chipset turns in better memory benchmark results with DDR2 than the X38 chipset; and very expensive DDR3 memory can outperform DDR2 for some benchmarks on DDR3 equipped X38 boards.

How did we reach 3.43GHz?

• set the FSB to 490MHz
• set the CPU multiplier to 7
• set the FSB voltage to 1.45V
• set the CPU voltage to 1.55V
• set the NB voltage to 1.41V
• chose the 333MHz memory strap
• set the memory for 4-4-4-12 @ 1000MHz

Conclusion

The stock results show that the Formula Maximus Special Edition performs well; and the overclocked results show that it can reach clock speeds fairly close to the maximum of other X38 and P35 boards.

The dual PCIe 2.0 16x slots mean that you will not run out of PCIe bandwidth for high end CrossFire setups; frankly, video cards are no where near saturating even a PCIe 1.0 8x link in dual card configurations, so the Maximus leaves you with plenty of headroom. The SATA performance of the board was excellent.

The BIOS is quite flexible, with a lot of parameters that will allow you tweak the board to your heart's content; however I wish Asus would allow for more saved overclocking profiles. The "Clear CMOS" button on the back I/O panel is a nice touch, it allows for pretty extreme overclocking experiments even once you have built the motherboard into your case - without having to open up the case to clear the CMOS in case you got a bit too aggressive with your settings.

The bundle is decent, and STALKER is a better than average pack-in game for a motherboard - however I'd rather have seen a lower price point for the board without the game.

Overall I like the board; it is a solid performer and should be on your shortlist if you're looking for a Core 2 performer.