Asus Maximus IV Gene-Z Z68 Motherboard Review

You probably read a couple of pages back how much we love the BIOS, and it’s times like this when we overclocking that you’ll see why. The UEFI BIOS allows us to manually adjust all of the settings needed to overclock.

Couple that with our 2700k which we know can do 5.3GHz at 1.5V, we were keen to see how this board got on with things, as it was its big brother, the Maximus IV Extreme-Z that allowed us to get 5.3GHz from our 2700k.

After pushing forward to 4.6GHz for our testing, we then decided to throw the board in at the deep end and go for 5GHz and things booted fine with a relatively low voltage at 1.425V. It’s only after this that we had to chuck a few extra volts at it to push it further and starting to up the multiplier to 51x and then 52x.

As the screenshot shows, 5.2GHz was quite easily achieved, through use of a 52x multiplier and 1.528V which was compensated through use of the load-line calibration so that we could gain a stable voltage. We did manage to hit 5.3GHz, much like we saw with the Maximus IV Extreme-Z, but voltages had to be increased a little bit higher, which wasn’t good for us, if you’re wanting to run a 24/7 overclock with that speed.

We decided to settle on 5.2GHz, and believe that in a different chassis environment, instead of a test bench, we believe that things could be pushed further, if we could keep the temperatures to a reasonable level.