ASUS ROG MAXIMUS VII HERO/ACU LGA 1150 Intel Z97 HDMI USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard

Pros: In a gaming system, this board coupled with a 4.0 GHz Core i7 Haswell CPU and an NVIDIA GTX 660 really zooms. Installation was as easy as a motherboard installation ever can be (you always have to deal with cable routing and such). Connectors are clearly documented in the manual and clearly labeled on the board. The circuit board itself seems to be of high quality, and ASUS used reliable connectors. I used to design circuit boards professionally, so these are things I notice and care about!

Upgrading the BIOS is dead easy. Just put the new BIOS file on a VFAT-formatted thumb drive, power the system off, insert the thumb drive into one specific USB port on the back, press and hold the button next to that USB port, and wait a minute or so until an LED stops blinking. Reboot. Done.

The BIOS is so configurable that even as a computer engineer I found that there were more options there than I really needed. If you want a board that you can deeply configure for overclocking, this is a good choice. I tweaked the things I wanted to tweak and kept the defaults otherwise, and the board is running stably and smoothly for me. If you're a beginner, the menu might be a little intimidating, but the defaults normally will work fine.

When researching this board online before purchase, I found one review that said you couldn't install Windows 7 on a solid state drive with this board. That's nonsense. I did just that and had no problems at all. Windows 7 boots off a SATA SSD for me in about 10 seconds.

The onboard gigabit Ethernet chipset performs nicely. I am doing game development and use this system to capture multi-gigabyte videos, which are transferred to another system for editing. The onboard Ethernet can fully stuff the GigE pipeline as fast as my network switch can go.

I give kudos to ASUS for providing a very detailed manual for the board, when a lot of companies don't seem to do that any more. This matters more than you might think, because unless you have another system nearby during installation, looking up configuration instructions online may not be very convenient, so the printed manual is a very useful item.

Cons: The Realtek audio driver has a known bug (documented online) that causes it to fail at boot time. Online, the consensus was to upgrade to the latest BIOS to fix this. I did so, but the problem persists. My video board is providing sound output, so I simply uninstalled and ignored the Realtek driver, but this may be a problem for others. I'm assuming ASUS or Realtek will fix it in a driver update, but for now this cost it one star in my review.

I found some of the marketing hype around the board's features (especially the bundled software) to be a bit excessive, but it can be ignored and doesn't diminish the quality of the board itself. Frankly, some of the software wasn't of any interest to me, so I didn't install all of it.

Overall Review: I bought this board with a 4.0 GHz Core i7 CPU as an upgrade for a gaming tower, replacing another ASUS board that has worked well but can't keep up with the newer games.

One installation caveat: Be sure to plug in not only the main ATX power connector, but also the PCI Express power connector located near the CPU socket. If you miss this step, the board will power up but won't boot. This is documented in the manual but easy to overlook, which I did the first time through! Get the cabling right, and you're off and running. My fault, not the board's, so I didn't take away a star for this.

Pros: Worked fine when it actually worked...for a month.

Cons: To my disappointment this board only lasted a month if that, not to mention the time I had with the ASUS RMA process. Well the only thing good I can say about this board is that it worked fine....for the month I actually got to use it. After that month when I went to turn on my computer it suddenly kept going into a boot loop before the BIOS screen would even come up. Constantly boot looping over and over again. I performed all the standard tests (remove RAM, check different RAM slots, upgrade the BIOS, perform out of box testing etc...) and after finding other reports on the Internet about the same boot loop problem with this board I issued an RMA with ASUS. This is where my horrible experience began.

I took documenting photos of how my motherboard looked before I shipped it off as well as a documenting video showing the boot loop problem which was occurring for proof of the condition my board was in before shipment. After a couple of weeks with the ASUS RMA department, no notifications or anything coming from them, I suddenly get my board back in the mail with the ROG heat sink torn off and laying in separate wrapping inside the box. This was accompanied with an letter stating that they tried to reach me by email and by phone about paying for the repair of my motherboard because my motherboard had "Customer Induced Damage" which wouldn't allow it to be repaired under warranty. This letter in an of itself was a lie because not once did ASUS contact me to notify me about the RMA status of my motherboard, no phone calls...nothing. But the overwhelming problem was that they said my board had customer induced damage without even telling me what this damage was.

I immediately sent a letter back to ASUS customer support stating how it's impossible that my board had customer induced damage because it was in pristine condition before I sent it off...no marks, blown components, overclocking damage, chip damage, anything because I took exceptional care of my motherboard and didn't modify anything in anyway...I didn't even overclock it. After a couple of days I received a message that stated my motherboard was "burned" and that's why it wasn't covered under the normal RMA process. How can a brand new motherboard fresh out the box and in use for only a month suddenly burn with no power surges or any case modifications that could cause a short?! More than likely seems like a faulty component to me within the motherboard itself according to the numerous reports on the Internet I've seen about these boot loop problems with this motherboard. Are you telling me all these people have "burned" motherboards as well???

Overall Review: At this point I'm extremely upset, I now have a $200 dollar paperweight from a motherboard that went dead with only a month of use and no support from ASUS concerning a repair or giving me a replacement motherboard. I've been an ASUS customer for years now, but I have to say this is the last motherboard I ever buy from them. I won't make the same mistake twice and be left footing the bill like I am now for a problem that wasn't caused by me.