Right then, this board is made for everything extreme, on the previous page you have been able to check up on them quite well. But there's more, features like a complex multi-phase power design will probably not even surprise you. We count 16 chokes for power phases of which 3-phase VTT digital VRM power and another 3 phases for memory power.

If you like extreme gaming then you'll spot five (!) PCIe x16 slots. ASUS added an NF200 chip from NVIDIA adding an additional 16x lanes PCIe. Three cards would get you 16:16:8 PCIe lanes four cards would get you 8:8:8:8 lanes available and five cards 8:8:8:4:4. So yes, Quad SLI + a PhysX card is in fact possible though limited and certainly not recommended drivers issues wise.

But as such, the P55 ASUS Maximus III Extreme has full Crossfire and SLI support and since it's crowded PXCIe wise, there was room left for only one legacy PCI slot. The board has physical power and reset buttons, 10 SATA ports of which two are SATA 6G (SATA3), eight are SATA2 and one eSATA2 port.

We mentioned it already, but we spotted a NEC chip and two blue colored USB ports on the motherboard as well, correct this mother board comes with full USB 3.0 support. We'll show you some numbers measured with a USB 3.0 SSD, and they really are stunning.

We also spot a Gigabit Ethernet connector (yes just one), 4 DIMM slots that support DDR3 memory up-to 16GB. These are ASUS dual-channel memory slots supporting speeds of up to 2,200MHz (overclocked), and a built-in VIA VT2020 10-Channel High Definition Audio CODEC promises some fairly high-end audio. You know what, we'll talk you through all features in the product photo-shoot.

BIOS features

We'll dive right into the BIOS now as for you as an overclocker and tweaker, it's the stuff that really matters. The ASUS BIOS is very much catered for overclocking and offers a really wide varsity of choices.

Since showing motherboard BIOS screenshots always misses out a lot we are now switching to high-definition video footage showing you around in the BIOS. This way we hope to give you a better insight of the BIOS features and functionality.

A plethora of options can be found really. Small side note, for good HD quality versus optimal streaming please select 720P.

Especially showing a BIOS with a lot of letters and numbers, that can help out a lot in readability and sharpness. We hope you like this new approach in showing you the BIOS features; and as you can see, this motherboard has a fantastic BIOS feature set and firmware flash options.

Mind you that if you plan to skip this video, we are overclocking towards 4200 MHz (on air) with a Intel Core i7 870 as well. At the end of the video you can see Windows running at 4200 MHz, be sure to select full-screen mode to be able to read the text and values in the video.