I admit, I bought this over the Gigabyte and MSI offerings almost solely for the looks. However this board has a lot going on for it.
- ROG armor looks great and gives the board a very clean look. The backplate gives you some peace of mind if you wanna test run your board without a case or test bench like I'm doing right now - just sit it on top of the plastic box that it comes with and none of the pins will touch the box's surface. Too bad the backplate cannot be seen once you actually use the board in any way - but still a great touch.
- The ROG logo lights up red and (I think) can be set to breathing mode. Unfortunately that and the power/reset buttons are the only things that light up - MSI gaming 9 and even the little bro Hero have more lighting. I would've liked to see the SupremeFX logo light up as well. Keep in mind that a big tower style CPU cooler will most likely block the logo. Best to go water if you wanna see that glorious red ROG. #swag
- Overall construction is top notch, as expected from the best Z97 offering from Asus. Mine came with the ROG logo lightly scratched but not a deal breaker, I have to look real closely to see the scratches and I never noticed until I was taking some glamor shots with it. Other than that, this board has no legacy PCI and can only do 2-way SLI and not 3, but CAN do quad-SLI if you have two dual GPU cards, e.g. GTX 690. 3-way CFx with AMD cards is supported though.
- SupremeFX - Asus hypes the hell out of this glorified Realtek audio solution - with luxury caps and opamps and what not. It sounds great, but it's still Realtek. Don't expect it to have enough juice to power your HD650/K702/"insert hard to drive headphones here" to full potential despite whatever Asus says. If you're using gaming headsets or some easy to drive headphones however, this may be all you need.
- Oveclocking is as expected - I can get 4.5 Ghz at 1.25V fully stable easily with my 4770k. My old MSI Z87 MPower Max can do this as well, however. Overall this board shouldn't limit you in any way as far OC capabilities go. There are also loads of controls in the BIOS.
- Installing drivers and software is a breeze, not much to say here. This board also comes with a lot of extra stuff - GameFirst, WiFi, KeyBot, etc. which many people may not care about. The inclusion of a 1-year Kaspersky subscription and DAEMON Tools Pro is appreciable for me though.
So, is it worth it to churn out an extra $100 for this board instead of the Hero? Probably not, if you're going by useful features and performance only. Comparing the two makes the Formula seem grossly overpriced. However the Formula has a really premium vibe that none of the other top end Z97 boards offer, plus that Asus reputation and reliability. If you can afford this board, by all means go for it. Or get the Hero for similar performance, more cool onboard lighting but without the armor/backplate, WiFi and the option to easily water cool your MOSFET. The choice is all yours, and I did not regret purchasing the Formula one bit - yet.
| RAM | DDR3 |
|---|---|
| Memory Speed | 3300 MHz |
| Number of USB 2.0 Ports | 2 |
