ASUS reveals Maximus IV Gene-Z Gen 3 ROG motherboard

ASUS is ready with its own high end PCI-E Gen 3 motherboards to support the upcoming Ivy Bridge release. MSI and Gigabyte have already introduced theirs after a messy press battle between them as MSI labelled Gigabyte as producing fake PCI-E Gen 3 motherboards. It is unlikely we will see such a ordeal with the computer giants ASUS. This board is based on a compact Micro ATX form factor design and is the second modification of the Maximus IV Gene-Z motherboard as the original was a P67 board, the second a Z68 board and now the third a PCI-E Gen 3 ready Z68 board.

ASUS have equipped the board with a 12 Phase digi+ VRM design so you get good overclocking capabilities although the power delivery is rather limited because of the size of the board. In terms of storage there is two SATA II ports, four SATA II ports and two e-SATA II ports.  Four DIMM slots are supported with speeds of up to 2200MHz with overclocking, the CPU socket is wired to two PCI-E 3.0 lanes which run 16X/Not Populated or 8X/8X at Gen 3 speeds. So note 8X/8X at Gen3 is equivalent to 16X/16X at Gen 2.  However, for the PCI-E 3.0 to be functional you must have a 22nm Ivy Bridge CPU which will arrive some time early next year. There is also a PCI-E 2.0 4X slot wired to the Z68 chipset for any expansion cards or PCI-E based storage solutions.

In terms of Audio there is a SupremeFX X-Fi chip which provides 8+2 channel HD audio, there is a single Intel controller driven LAN port along with four USB 3.0 ports two via header at the front and two via the rear IO panel. There are the usual ROG exclusives such as GameFirst, ROG Connect, GPU.DIMM Post, CPU Level Up, and Mem TweakIt. The board is driven by UEFI firmware, with ASUS ROG-themed setup program that has a few more tweaking options. Pricing and availability information is not known.

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