Asus Maximus V Gene (Z77) Motherboard Sandy Bridge 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.

We’ve always found Asus boards to be some of the best out there for overclocking and its no surprise then that all of our CPUs have given us their best clocks on an Asus ROG board. With this we made it our aim to get our 2700k to the next level at give its its own personal best.  With a bit of extra tweaking on the vCore and adding a little more to the the PLL voltage, we tried the 53x multiplier but its wasn’t to be. Not to be put off, back down to the 52x and time to up the BCLK to give that little bit extra.

After some failed attempts, we ended up so close to getting a stable overclock at 5.3GHz, but unfortunately it wasn’t to be, but we did get very close to it with a respectable 5.292GHz. Overall, another victory for the ROG boards.