Gallery - the ASUS Maximum III Gene

Right directly after unpacking you'll notice 1) a beautiful designed motherboard. 2) the nice small mATX design. That's a nifty looking feature rich motherboards alright. Nice black PCB with red coloring schema and the usual complementary products. ASUS always does it's bundle well and as such you'll find one motherboard, a manual that explain every aspect of the board other than that you'll find a back I/O panel protector, an SLI bridge connector, various chassis stickers and also four S-ATA cables, and little jumper extensions.

We stated this already but expect the Maximus III Gene to be found in the 199 USD / 175 EUR price range. The board has the classic Republic of Gamers design with the red themed color scheme and the always black PCB. But look at the connectivity on that toosh there, for a mATX motherboard that's quite stuffed. Let's zoom in a little and focus on the back-panel connectors.

Check that out, from left to right that's a PS2 keyboard connector. Then I count a total of nine USB 2.0 ports (one port for ROG Connect) one eSATA ports, Firewire, unfortunately only one Gigabit Ethernet. Digital audio in the form of optical TOSLINK connectors, and then all the way to the right the analog audio connectors. You can also spot a button for CMOS clear and ROG Connect. Well, that certainly is a good start, that back panel is stuffed full to the last square inch. Audio is managed by a Creative labs 8-channel solution, SupremeFX X-Fi which comes with featrures like EAX 4.0, CMSS 3D, and the popular X-Fi Crystallizer.

When we flip the board around we stumble into the processor area. We spot the 8-pin CPU power header located perfectly, ferrite core chokes and obviously the all new Socket 1156. The board has all solid capacitor design with high quality parts from Japan. Also lower RDS MOSFETs, ferrite core chokes and lower ESR solid capacitors are used here. We see the that the board design is completely passively cooled.