This motherboard stands out to be in a few interesting ways. I trust EVGA as a brand, it has decent overclocking ability, etc. Here's a few points and questions
Does anyone own this and dislike it?
Is the extra 6 pin power delivery necessary?
This has an E key m.2 which is useless for an m.2 ssd...Is there a similarly priced board with a "regular" m.2 connection?
Gotta have that I/O shroud. I have one on my currently windowed r4 with my h100i and i'm loving how hidden everything is back there. looks much more clean.
i dont own the board my self, so i cannot add to much about user experiance.
But the additional 6 pin pci-e power connector is not needed. Its just a 75W additional power for the pci-e slots.
But you dont realy need this in most cases.
Further i think its a good looking board, but in terms of feutures and what not, it does not realy look very special to me.
My z77 stinger has terrible memory support in the bios. No xmp and the auto settings are not always right. Maybe they have fixed this, but on the z77 it is still a problem even on the latest bios. I have to run my 2x8gb 1600mhz at 1333mhz because that is what auto defaults too and any thing higher is unstable because the timings are off and if I manually set them it is still unstable. Other then that it is pretty decent I got it for only a $100 which was a steal at the time and I have it stable running 4.2ghz on the cpu.
Thinking about grabbing the Asus maximus hero vii instead. it's still a very pretty board. my only real issue with it is the wasted space on the rear i/o for the video outputs.
i find that was a weird decision for asus especially for an rog board. just give me 10+ usb ports i don't need video outputs.
well the thing is, that intel MS cpu´s have an igpu. Thats the reason why video ports are there on the mobo´s.
The Maximus 7 Hero is offcourse a sollid board for overclocking. its one of my favorite Z97 boards out there to be honnest. But offcourse thats personal.
I personaly realy like the feutures like keybot, and the great onboard audio solution. i also like the intel lan instead of killer that you find on most z97 gaming boards. And in my opinnion Asus rog boards have the most overclocking friendly bios. But offcourse thats personal again.