Asus Maximus IV Extreme-Z Z68 Motherboard Review

Asus have always been a top contender when it comes to motherboards, having a good grip onto most market segments. This obviously includes the enthusiast and extreme market and they have a separate division of the company to deal with it called ROG or Republic of Gamers.

They are best known for their red and black styled motherboards that offer extreme stability, especially when pushing your hardware to the limits. They include certain features that other boards don’t including extra voltage options, monitoring points and much more.

We’ve taken a look at the likes of the Asus Crosshair IV Formula before and soon to be the Crosshair V, which are all part of the Republic of Gamers product range and follow the same criteria as specified above. A key motherboard from Asus is the Maximus IV Extreme which utilised the P67 platform and was able to push sandybridge based systems to the top. With the release of the Z68 platform, Asus have taken the already top selling board and changed a few key points including the addition of the Z68 controller and today sees us taking a look at that board, the Maximus IV Extreme-Z; a board focussed upon the Z68 chipset with the most top-end features in today’s market.

This particular board is said to offer extreme performance and some unique features that will be appreciated by people much like myself. As usual, we’ll take a look at the packaging, board, BIOS and then put it under our extreme rigorous testing procedures to see how well it can cope, but just from what we’ve heard about this board, we hold high hopes in terms of performance, overclocking and just having that general wow factor, whilst maintaining stability when needed the most.