Package and Contents

The first thing you notice about the Maximus III Extreme is the box. It is bright red and guaranteed to grab your eye if you passed this by on the shelf.

Once you get past the shock of the red (and the star burst in the corner) you will notice that the front of the box has a flap. Opening this flap shows you a couple of things. The first and most important is the actual motherboard. It is visible in all its glory through a plastic window. Once you tear your eyes away from that rather impressive site you find that the top part of the flap has the usual marketing items that the front of most other motherboard boxes has.

The back of the box rounds out the set of the marketing propaganda with pictures of some of the highlighted features and a complete list of specifications.

Inside the box are a pair of smaller black boxes that contain the motherboard and all of the loot that ASUS has stuffed into this product.

As you can see, the haul you get with the Maximus III Extreme is quite sizable (as it should be). You get a nice set of labels for your SATA cables, both a Crossfire and SLI bridge, a Bluetooth module, three thermistors, a sticker, a USB cable for ROG connect and even a Tri-SLI bridge.

The Bluetooth module is important as it is needed for use with the new Bluetooth overclocking feature that is present on the Maximus. But, for those of you that are iPhone users, well, there is not an app for that just yet, not even on Cydia. We will cover this in more detail later in the review.