Asus Maximus V Gene (Z77) Motherboard Ivy Bridge Review

So where do I start for a conclusion. I’ve already covered the majority of the board in my previous Sandy Bridge based review and thus I don’t want to tread over the same grounds twice putting in information that would repeat myself and make for to much of a read for you the readers. This in mind i’ve got a few points that I’m going to go over based on the Maximus V Gene under Ivy Bridge and its relative performance.

Going back to our overclock with the 3770k on this board, I was expecting a little more from it based on our experiences with Sandy Bridge and ROG boards but unfortunately breaking the 5GHz barrier just wasn’t going to happen. From a first glance, this is not to say that Ivy Bridge is poor for overclocking, we’ve seen posts around the world showing that the processors are capable of some very impressive speeds. What I would be inclined to say here is that our particular chip is a poor clocker. In a real world scenario, no two chips will behave the same and sometimes (more than often) its pot luck if you get a good chip or not.

Moving onto the performance figures, you may be as surprised as we were when the gaming performance didn’t have a significant margin over Sandy Bridge. After a bit of analysis we’ve put this down to the drivers and when an updated set of drivers come out shortly, we expect to see a performance gain that sets Ivy Bridge apart from Sandy Bridge. With Ivy Bridge we can now say that any PCI-e 3.0 cards that you may already have or are looking to buy, will now be able to run at Gen 3.0 speeds with an IB chip thus giving upto 32x bandwidth – whilst we have not seen the boost here, as I mentioned, this is most likely a driver related issue and come an update we should see it prove itself to the world.

In sort I will say again that we are huge fans of ROG boards at eTeknix and the Maximus V Gene has already added itself to the club, whilst it doesn’t seem that Ivy Bridge is all that its hyped up to be for now, come future driver releases, I really do expect to see the results jump up a notch and show that its worth the upgrade.