ASUS Z87 Motherboards - Overview, Guides and Official Support

[RPGWiZaRD]

HERO has amazing audio, better than Extreme6 in my testing. Working on my review of the Extreme6 right now, actually. I have some performance issues with EX6 I am trying to figure out, OC isn't holding what I set and I see multi drop about 300 MHz like it's running default Intel Turbo with raised multis. Could be a cooling thing for the board since I pulled VRM coolers for VRM pics, but I replaced and contact seems good. Still trying to figure it out, honestly, but today is the last day I spend on it. See anything like that with yours?

My HERO review is here, so you can check RMAA results for HERO:

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/A...XIMUS_VI_HERO/

RMAA results for EX6 has high SNR, but also, more noise.

Thanks, did you happen to notice any differences in how much EMI / interfearence the boards pick up? The ASRock Extreme6 to me has unacceptably much EMI noise (HDD activity, mouse interfearence, high system load etc). It's one of the reasons I wanna swap boards in fact, I'm using a headphone amp so ofc it will be worse then but I love the sound of the amp so I'd just prefer to find an onboard solution (I also happen to like how the soundstage sounds like on Realtek when set to 5.1 speakers when using headphones) that just has low enough static interfearence from the rest of the components, at least as low as my ALC889A chip I had before... it wasn't actually low but yea much lower than with the ASRock board at least... Getting popping sound often when minimizing & maximizing a window and the HDD activity can be heard a bit with a buzzing/popping sound (depends on the vol set on the amp, at full volume and lower Realtek output vol which was borderline acceptable on the old ALC889A chip but very unacceptable on the Extreme6, so have to lower the amp volume a lot with this Extreme6 but it is still very much there and then it also sounds a bit worse than if using a bit higher vol setting on the amp and lower vol on the source so basically I'd want to be able to go high on the amp vol without getting that noise).

And yes I've tried 3rd party soundcards including ASUS D2, Titanium HD and SoundBlaster ZxR but I just prefer the way soundstage is portrayed with onboard (when using 5.1 speakers with my headphones), the ZxR while having excellent quality especially in the midrange sounds, has very closed-in sound compared to onboard no matter how the speaker config is setup.

EDIT: I haven't specifically payed much attention to the performance yet but it feels a bit sluggish at times maybe. Running at a modest 4.4GHz only but it does so with ease though and it seemed much more difficult to get 4.5GHz stable. But with the ASUS board I will very likely give another go at trying to push to 4.5-4.6GHz as the temps are very low still.