Asus Maximus IV GENE-Z/GEN3 - and how i saved it from death :D

Only in today's world of computing, can you find luxury parts for your extreme customization needs,  while the market is plagued by many brands, one has come to cater to such market and Asus, offering is quite an extreme one! the Asus Maximus IV!

Kick ass 1155 mother board

Designed for the newest series of second generation Intel 1155 Core Series processors, comes the Asus Maximus IV,  a Motherboard that takes all of the customizations and options that extreme gamers have come to demand, a powerfull piece of hardware that can be fine tuned to your every need, with increased surge protection and extra phase change capacitors, this card is any over clocker`s dream come true!

Intel Z68 Express Chipset - the heart of the board

constructed as a single on board chip solution, Intels new Z68 chipset  supports the newest second generation Core i3/i5/i7  socket 1155 processors, as well as a revamped communication engine, that can deal with heavy loads of traffic such as those of the SATA 3.0 (6.0 GigaBit per second), PciExpress 3.0 (backwards compatible with pciexpress 2.0 and 2.1), USB 3.0 (500Mb/second tranfers) and support for 16x Dual pciexpress 3.0 socket , ready to handle either AMD/ATI crossfire or Nvidia's SLI , this board has it all!

You can use two of your favorite brand's card with out hassle! at full speed!

Advanced Bios tweaking - Configure your Ram and CPU without limits!
Slapped with what might be the worlds first fully customizable bios, it comes with a pletora of options for you to play with, and even comes with a graphic-mouse compatible interface!

you can use your mouse inside the bios screen, its like a mini operating system :O

You can use up to 4 Memory sticks of 8GB of ram for a total of 32Gigabytes, and each dimm port is fully customizable from every single Latency value, to its voltage and even the clock/bus multiplier for extreme customization, no more hassle in guessing correct bus speeds for your memory,  set it once and forget about it while you overclock!.

Internal Connectors and Back panel - Get a  load of all these connectors!
Not satisfied in bringing the top of the line, customization for overclocking needs and memory tweaking, the board comes with a load of connectors, inside we find the usual I/O ports such as USB 3x 2.0 header connectors.  Six Serial Ata connectors, two which come as Sata 3.0 ports, 4 DDR3 Memory Dimm ports with support up to 8GB 1600mhz ram per slot,  Two 16x Pci express ports and a big heat sink on top of every heat producing component on the board.  it also includes 1 internal pin headed USB 3.0 connector and 2 USB 2.0 pin headers. The board comes with a Led display for easy troubleshooting by its code numbers (the manual has all the description of them) and a big round Power and Reset button to aid as you find the sweet spot for your overclock, whilst having the board out of the pc case, a common practice of all over clockers around.

strange to find a floppy connector, yet no IDE connector at all

The back panel is a Sight to behold, as it wastes no space to cram as many usb connectors as possible for your gaming gadget needs, surprisingly sporting only two USB 3.0 blue coded connectors, two E-sata red coded outputs, and 8 x Usb 2.0 connectors as well, one Gigabit Ethernet port and a blue/green Legacy keyboard mouse connector, which is a nice to include as some of us still use our old trusty mechanical ps/2 keyboards, there is a BIOS RESET button, that serves to put our bios back at a default  configuration, should our crazy overclock render the system un-bootable. The integrated Realtek sound card has its own 6 connector  outputs while the integrated XFI2 sound card has its dedicated optical and digital output ports beside.

look at all those connectors :D

This is one extreme motherboard, with a price point of around 300$, this is surely not for beginners, but rather computer enthusiasts that want the best to play with and Asus does not diss apoint

•  Socket 1155 for second gen intel core i line
• High over clock ability functions, able to fine tune every single aspect of your components
• Big heatsinks and lots of capacitors and extra power phase changers
• Lots of USB ports on the back and USB 3.0 support

And if you even needed more, the newest Revision 3.0 model of this board comes with 10 x USB 3.0 ports in the back... just wow!

 And then my friend bought one and bent some pins by accident  D: - Time for some surgery!

With a great board, comes a great responsibility, and we still live in a time where frail little pins can get  broken or bent and render a good motherboard useless, my friend took all the precautions needed to assemble his Computer, yet he (like many) managed to flick the protective plastic cover of the pins, across some of the same pins the shield was intended to cover, this little piece of plastic sometimes comes tightly seated in place, and if youre not careful  you can have an accident!

 i unbend pins for breakfast o3o

Having a slightly bent pin can sometimes be ignored as the tip of the pin is still on its desiganted place, how ever in this case this and 3 other pins got bent around so badly that they looked broken already.. so i had to zoom in with the help of my big magnifying glass a trusty toothpick and lots of patience to undo the harm,  little by little the pins came to their original spot.. and after a few hours,  i had success in my hands :D

as long as the tip of the pins are in place, it doesnt matter if the pins dont show the same shiny color to them

Sadly my video recorder was broken at the moment, so i have no way of showing you how i did it, but as soon as i get a hold of a broken 1156/1155 board ill update, just imagine a big pin pushing another into place..xD

I must play with this board - time to test some cross fire and SLI

With the board in my posession for the next days, i decided to play with it a bit and try out a few SLI / crossfire configs to see how they worked.. join me next time as i show you some benchmarks :3