ASUS Maximus IV Extreme-Z (Intel Z68) Motherboard Review

Introduction

The Republic of Gamers boards from ASUS have done a great job of impressing us. In June we had a look at the Maximus IV Extreme. Moving to July, we checked out the Maximus IV Gene-Z and today we check out the Maximus IV Extreme-Z. To be honest, before I even start testing, I have a good feeling about the board simply because of the track record. But of course, we'll see just what the Maximus IV Extreme-Z is able to offer.

Before we get into the performance side of things, there are a few other areas we need to look at which is of course starting off with the package. Once we've done that, we'll get stuck in to the motherboard itself and just see what kind of features are on offer from the Maximus IV Extreme-Z. We'll fire up the BIOS and show you all those options ASUS are offering before we get into looking at our testbed, which carries with it a few changes, along with the overclocking capabilities of the board.

Once we've gone through those formalities, it's on to the benchmarking side of things to see just what kind of performance we're able to get out of the Maximus IV Extreme-Z. First, though, let's check out the package and see just what's going on.

The Package

The box has a heap of information as it can be opened up and from one area you can see we're able to see the board itself which is always appealing. Turning to the back of the box, you can see the main feature and specification table which gives us a good run down of what exactly the board offers. We'll get more into that a little later, though.

Moving inside the package, we've got the normal ROG bits and pieces which include some paperwork, driver CD, HDD stickers, ROG sticker and some information on the Xonar line of audio cards.

In the cable department we've got four SATA II cables and four SATA III cables, ROG Connect, temperature probe, back plate, 3-way SLI connector, extended SLI connector and a CrossFire connector.

Finally, we've got a USB header, Bluetooth module and Ez Connector modules. All in all, we've got a strong bundle from ASUS and we wouldn't expect anything less out of an ROG board.