Overclock

Overclocking on the Impact was a little different than on some other Asus boards. Typically, AI Suite will slowly overclock and benchmark over and over again to reach the highest possible overclock. With the Impact the software just gives you three optional clock speed goals and it will overclock to that and benchmark to make sure it can handle the overclock. I would personally prefer the other way because It gives a better overclock, but I have a feeling this was something they had to give up due to space on the PCB being limited. That said I was able to get the Impact to run at the 4400 MHz option, 4600 MHz was a little higher than it could handle. Looking back at our last Asus Z97 review I was able to get 4590 MHz, so the Impact not hitting 4600 MHz safely isn’t a big surprise. Even at 4.4 GHz that is a nice improvement. Not to mention it will be a little more stable with the headroom left over. It is possible that some people will be able to see 4.6 GHz though depending on their CPU.