Quote Originally Posted by RPGWiZaRD View Post
I'm really considering swapping mobo from ASRock Extreme6 to Maximus VI Hero or Gene but what I'm wondering is are the boards exactly the same minus PCI-E 2 slots vs 3 slots? What about the audio, ASUS touts Gene having 115dB SNR (very high for onboard) on their homepage but it says nothing about the Hero. I'd prefer whichever has better sound or less EMI interfearence if there's any difference (probably not but doesn't hurt to ask if any1 would happen to know more). :p

Reason I'm asking is that mATX often gets used as "HTPC" whereas audio might be slightly more in the focus than a bigger sized board...

Newegg comments has 3 positive comments on audio for VI Gene, one including that appearently used a socket 1155 board before and had some EMI issues but zero with the new Gene. With my ASRock Z87 Extreme6 with ALC1150 there's actually more noise than with my old Gigabyte P55 UD5 that used an ALC889A chip despite ALC889A had no shielding and the ASRock board has shielding + excluded PCB space...

The size of the board has no importance to me, if features are the same on Hero and Gene (same power config etc that matters for OCing) then I could consider both.
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.