ASUS Republic Of Gamers Maximus VI Hero Intel Z87 Motherboard Review

Final Thoughts and Conclusions

The ASUS Republic of Gamers Hero Z87 motherboard, may be just that, a Hero! While the price tag of $229.00 shipped may make some shy away, though there’s a greater chance that it may make many more take advantage of the previously unobtainable ROG motherboard! Personally I don’t know that I would ever spend $300-$400 on a motherboard, I’m just not that extreme, though I never say never. I have had several Republic of Gamers motherboards in the past, and they have never let me down, so I would consider it. Though now that ASUS has launched the Maximus VI Hero for only $229 I won’t need to. Now that we have the testing complete, and everything wrapped up with the Maximus VI Hero, all that comes to mind is WOW, this board lives up to the Republic of Gamers Name!

One of the things we like to do here at Legit Reviews is to test the sub-systems of the motherboards that come through the labs. The ASUS Maximus VI Hero dominated the field. SATA III 6Gbps tests showed that the Hero was faster, not significantly but certainly faster. SuperSpeed USB 3.0 testing gave the Hero the lead again. What’s most impressive about these tests is that it’s all coming from the Intel Z87 chipset, you would think that it would be much more consistent between the motherboard companies, but ASUS always seems to dominate the field and the Maximus VI Hero was no exception to the rule! The Audio testing as well was a win for the ASUS Maximus VI Hero. The Audio on the ASUS ROG Maximus VI Hero is the Realtek ALC1150, couple it with the other components that ASUS uses to create a quality sound, and it will easily rival even the ASUS entry level discrete sound cards, and that’s per ASUS:

The ROG boards have some audio improvements that rival discrete soundacrds – from layout optimizations to usage of components such as a headphone buffer and capacitors (dependant on model). If the usage scenario is simply surround sound without usage of high impedance headphones, the audio solution on the ROG motherboards should be sufficient – would be pretty hard to tell the difference between onboard sound and discrete sound.

We spent some time overclocking the Hero as found that it was a very capable motherboard. Within moments we were able to successfully boot the system up at 4.6GHz by simply increasing the vCore to 1.2v and adjusting the multiplier to 46. We were rock solid at 4.6GHz. Next we tried increasing our CPU to 4.7GHz and that went flawlessly! Beyond 4.6GHz it started getting tougher as we started hitting thermal limits despite using the Corsair H100i AIO water cooler. At the end of the day we were able to boot up and benchmark at 4.8GHz! We had to take the vCore up to 1.3 Volts, but we got the job done. In the grand scheme of things though, I would prefer to run our Intel Core i7 4770K at 4.6GHz and 1.2 Volts rather than pushing it 24/7 at 1.3 Volts. Though it’s always fun to see what can be done and I was certainly impressed by the ASUS Maximus VI Hero.

The overall performance of the ASUS ROG Maximus VI Hero was absolutely flawless which is great. When I first heard that ASUS was launching a ‘Value’ ROG motherboard for the latest Intel fourth generation ‘Haswell’ processors, I was a little curious and maybe a little skeptical about it. After spending some time with it though, any skepticism I had has certainly been quelled. As much as I hate to bring up the possibility of the Maximus VI Hero failing, it’s a chance we take with any component. If something does happen to the Hero, ASUS has the Maximus VI Hero backed by a 3 year limited warranty just in case.

Legit Bottom Line: The ASUS ROG Maximus VI Hero definitely lives up to the ROG name and saves us some bank! The ASUS ROG Maximus VI Hero performs great, overclocks great and generally does everything great! I would certainly have no issues using this board in my personal system or recommending it to anyone!