[section_title title=Overclocking]
Overclocking
Being a ROG motherboard, you’d probably expect the Maximus VIII Hero to overclock very easily, and to be able to maintain a good overclock without stability issues. Your expectations would not be wrong, and I am glad to report that overclocking on the Hero was just as easy as any other motherboard. Whilst there are a few options that are hidden compared to the MSI Z170A GAMING M7, as they’re not right in your face when you open up the overclocking menu, they are there and you will be able to take full advantage of them. It is worth noting that these settings are only really required when you’re overclocking with extreme cooling methods such as liquid nitrogen. As we aren’t going to be testing this motherboard under liquid nitrogen or any other form of sub-zero cooling, let’s focus on what it can do on a top-end air cooler and once some respectable volts are thrown at the CPU.
It is worth noting that our sample is not the most amazing CPU in the world, but it is a chip which will overclock nonetheless. The different LLC (Load Line Calibration) levels that you can set in the UEFI BIOS also play a massive role in the amount of voltage that is supplied to the CPU when it goes under load (heavy or light). There are varying levels which you can set in the BIOS, but only the upper ones have a real effect on the voltage. Our results were gathered with a digital multi meter (DMM) and it reported that whilst we were using LLC Level 7, it overvolted by 0.045 volts, which means that when you set 1.4 volts in the BIOS (which is what I need to use for 4.7 GHz), it is really applying 1.445 volts to the CPU. Extra heat is of course produced as a direct effect of the increased voltage, but it does ensure that your CPU will remain stable under high loading. As vDroop (the voltage dropping under load) is often the cause of an unstable overclock and it needs correcting by increasing the voltage to compensate for the droop. In my overclocking endeavours, I left it on auto, but I found that LLC 6 (see the screen shot below) was more than adequate as the voltage control on this motherboard is more than capable of holding a stable voltage.
While it is always fine and dandy to see how high you can get a screenshot, that does not qualify as being a valid overclock for me (not in the reviews anyway). It has to be able to run benchmarks, and not crash, in order to pass. My chosen method is to stress the CPU with a program called Intel XTU. It uses Prime95 algorithms in order to stress the CPU. It’s a quick blast of varying load levels that can cause an unstable CPU to crash in less than a minute. Granted it isn’t the most effective method to test a stable overclock, it gives a very good insight as to whether or not it is stable enough for other benchmarks, which qualifies it as a useful overclock to me.
The performance didn’t just leave us as soon as I began to overclock. The performance which was witnessed during the stock runs was also carried through to the overclocked results. In fact, the Maximus VIII Hero currently holds my highest XTU score that I’ve ever set with the Intel Core i7-6700K processor. The benchmark generates a score based upon three things, the motherboard, the CPU and the RAM, which need to be as efficient as possible to produce the highest possible score.
Overclocking was pretty much a painless affair, well, for the most part anyway. The only issues I had were with the voltages being slightly off, but there’s no motherboard that’ll correct that for you when it is set to a full manual mode; so the Maximus VIII Hero cannot be faulted as the LED poster helped me to determine what the issue was within seconds. Of course, for those of you whom do not know the most common POST code errors, it will take a little longer for you to diagnose. However, for those of you that do know what they are, you’ll be back into the BIOS and sorting the issue out within seconds. The BIOS is quick to move through with great fluidity and minimal lag when switching between menus, which is always a key aspect I look for when grading its usability.
What do you mean it has no M2 port? Really? Ic can be seen from an airplane.
Of course it has one, just not in the place where you would traditionally see it on other boards. This is clearly stated on the first page of the review above the image which shows it alongside the SATA connections…
“So, what we have is a total of six SATA 6 Gbps ports (grey) and four ports which come from the two SATA Express ports. The other connectivity option is of course one of Z170’s big selling points – the M.2 PCI-E port.”