ASUS ROG Maximus XII Extreme Review

Test Setup

ASUS Z490 Maximus XII Extreme – 0509 BIOS
Intel Core i9-10900K
Corsair LPX 4000 MHz
Corsair MP500 M.2 – OS Drive
Samsung 970 Pro
Corsair AX1600i
Nvidia RTX 2080Ti
Corsair HX1000i
Corsair H150i
Corsair ML Fans
Fractal Define 7

Overclocking

Not to lift the veil as such, but as we don’t own a time machine we always receive products a while before they are due to be revealed to the public. This means working with early drivers or, in the case of the Z490, early BIOS editions. A large part of our intial time with the Z490 motherboards was spent getting things stable, only to get an updated BIOS and have to start again. However, ASUS are famous for their robust BIOS and once we’d got a final edition it was extremely quick to push our Comet Lake Core i9-10900K to its limits, which in this case was 5.4 GHz across all ten cores. It certainly demonstrates that the Maximus XII Extreme lives up to all the expectations of an ASUS Republic of Gamers motherboard. Blimey Charlie.

Naturally that’s not the kind of speed you can run 24/7. It’s stable enough for some tests, but not all, and we’re not the kind of website that will show you one thing, what used to be called a suicide CPUz, and use something else for testing. Hence our test speeds were a still not inconsiderable 5.2GHz.