It’s official: People who buy motherboards with mainstream chipsets such as the P45 don’t want to pay for DDR3. At least, that’s what it seems like to us. Asus’s impressive Maximus II Formula is the third P45-based board we’ve tested, and not one of them sports DDR3 slots. But that doesn’t take anything away from the MIIF, the coolest P45 board we’ve encountered.
With its subdued heatsink, motherboard-based X-Fi support, and oversized start and reset buttons, the Maximus II Formula sports some slick features. It performs quite ably too. MSI’s more garish P45 Platinum outpaces the MIIF by a small margin in some benchmarks, but the MIIF led the MSI and a Gigabyte P45 board in RAM speeds. So, we’ll call it a wash.
In hardware features, it’s close, but we give the edge to the MIIF, with its eight SATA ports and superior audio. We also prefer its ADI-based codecs and drivers over Realtek’s. We’ve been worried about ADI software support since the company quit the PC audio business, but a spokesperson told us that ADI is not quitting on driver support (let’s hope). Plus, there’s the MIIF’s X-Fi support, which produces more satisfying gaming audio than Realtek’s solution—despite the absence of promised EAX4 support. Creative-licensed X-Fi drivers supposedly enable EAX4 on boards that don’t even use Creative hardware. That’s cool, but we couldn’t get the EAX4 support to work, and even the tools Creative gave us said the feature wasn’t working.
Creative officials insist that it’s there, but it’s not, at least not with the drivers that come out of the box or the ones on Asus’s website. If Creative and Asus are true to their word, the feature will eventually pop up, making the audio experience even better.
There’s a catch to all this goodness: The MIIF has a $260 street price, while the equally fast MSI P45 Platinum is about $75 less. But that extra $75 does get you a lot, including an English-language POST LCD box, X-Fi EAX4 support (hopefully), and more SATA ports. It also gets you a heatsink that doesn’t look like a bad art-school project.
Tons of SATA ports, some X-Fi support, an eye-pleasing color scheme.
Pricey; we couldn’t enable the EAX4 modes.
| Asus Maximus II Formula | MSI P45 Platinum | |
|---|---|---|
| PCMark06 Overall | 8,315 | 8,756 |
| PCMark RAM | 5,826 | 5,737 |
| 3DMARK06 Overall | 12,442 | 12,735 |
| ScienceMark 2.0 Overall | 4,162 | 4,129 |
| ScienceMark 2.0 Mem | 7,048 | 7,112 |
| Valve Particle Test (fps) | 85 | 88 |
| UT3 (fps) | 117 | 117 |
| FEAR (fps) | 215 | 245 |
| Quake 4 (fps) | 184.0 | 177 |
WeThePeople
February 01, 2009 at 11:10pm
Would you be so kind as to tell those of us that toddle on in here (From a TestFreaks.com referal) whom aren't on the bleeding edge of knowledge just which MSI board you are referring to please?
Thank you. :)
Spider-Mom
November 13, 2008 at 7:22pm
The MSI gets 400 more PCmarks, 300 more 3Dmarks, 3FPS more in the VPT and a whopping 30FPS more in FEAR and you call it a wash because Asus does a little better on some artifical irrelevant ram test?!?? The only thigns this ASUS beats it in is Pcmark Ram, SciMark and Q4. Q4 is the only bench where it was better by any signifcant margin.
Sorry but a few more ports that no one is going to use, non working sound and its color do not make up for it. The idea that the Asus is some how better because you dont like the looks of the heat sink on the MSI is bad.
Peanut Fox
November 13, 2008 at 10:08pm
This review is actually a few months old. It could just be that the board was on fresh drivers. The new ones may have negated or topped these numbers
Spider-Mom
November 14, 2008 at 5:30pm
Come on. Theres a new KICK ASS fear gaming coming out in Jan with even better tech specs. I dont see Q5 being released any time soon. I think the FEAR benchmark is JUST A LITTLE bit more relevant than that stupid ram test.
jwalch.hawk
November 13, 2008 at 6:00pm
Am I the only one who couldn't help but chuckle every time I hit this?
VoodooChicken
November 14, 2008 at 12:08pm
I'm chuckling about you hitting a MIIF. Bravo!
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Look behind you! A THREE-headed monkey!!!!!!!!
xs0u1x
November 13, 2008 at 4:46pm
"dont want to pay for ddr3"
well no sh*t sherlock.......i recently read an article here on her about memory makers firing people and stopping production to raise prices on memory, i dont know about you guys but that seems kind of ass backwards, i mean, its the 21st century now, shouldnt top notch technology be more affordable to the average power user? or average joe for that? we will never make it to science fiction(minority report what i can compare it too) technology being the norm with people like that.
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