"HITS A BENCHMARK-LEADING 5.2GHZ WITH THE 2600K, AND THAT'S WITH AIR-COOLING"
VITAL STATISTICS
Price £260
Web asus.com
Chipset P67
Memory support dual channel DDR3 up to 2,200MHz
Slots 4x PCI-exl6
I/0 4xSATA 6Gbps.4xSATA 3Gbps.8x U5B3.0
Form factor Extended ATX
Feature-rich
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| ASUS ROG MAXIM US IV EXTREME |
VITAL STATISTICS
Price £260
Web asus.com
Chipset P67
Memory support dual channel DDR3 up to 2,200MHz
Slots 4x PCI-exl6
I/0 4xSATA 6Gbps.4xSATA 3Gbps.8x U5B3.0
Form factor Extended ATX
Should you see Foxconn's H61 as the Fiat 500 of this Sandy Bridge mobo group test then Asus's Maximus Extreme IV has to be the Bugatti Veyron. It's big, brash, crammed full of features and eye-wateringly expensive. But then it also comes with blistering performance too.
To say the feature list of the Maximus IV Extreme is good is to do it a disservice. The list seems endless: dual channel DDR3support up to2.200MHz(OC), support for 3-way SLI and CrossFireX via four PCI-e slots, four SATA 6Gbps and four SATA 3Gbps and eight USB 3.0 portson the rearpanel - and that's just for starters. You can run quad-SLI on this board if you fancy, but youll have to pick up Asus'bizarreplugin daughter board.
Unfortunately, as the board uses the P67 chipset there's no way to access the integrated graphics of the Sandy Bridge processors but on the flip side it fully supports the overclocking capabilities of the K series Sandy Bridge CPU's. And that's what this board's all about: straight-line performance.
Feature-rich
As you might expect for the price, there is a bit more going on than what can be supported by the P67 chipset with other third-party controllers dotted about.
One of these is an NVIDIA NF200 chip sitting under a passive cooler between the CPU socket and the first PCI-e slot. Out of the box the P67 has 16 PCI-e lanes which can either be used as a single xl6 or when a CrossRre or SLI setup is used x8/x8, by adding the NVIDIA chip a third graphics card can be added without resorting to one running at x4. If more bandwidth grunt is needed there's also a PLX bridge chip to increase the bandwidth and if the need for even more power arises then there's a PCB-mounted 4-pin Molex connector.
Sitting just under the slots are four on/off switches. Should you have a card failure in a multi card setup, you can turn the slots off one by one to find the stricken card. Under the switches is a small bank of headers to use with a multimeter to get a true idea of the voltages going to various components without having to go into the BIOS. This is all about serious overclocking then.
The real delight though is the Maximus IV Extreme's freakish performance. We managed to hit a benchmark-leading 5.2GHz with the 2600K, and that's with air-cooling alone. The equally pricey MSI Big Bang Marshal can get mighty close to operating at that speed.
Asus has brought all its Republic Of Gamers knowledge to bear on Intel's P67 chipset. From the build quality, to the multitude of BIOS adjustments, to the provision of four PCI-e slots and produced a stunning motherboard. If you have the budget for it then Asus Maximus IV Extreme is probably the best implementation of the P67 chipset around and helps to bring out the best in a K series CPU. It's also probably the most feature-rich P67 board on the market.
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