ASUS ROG Maximus IX Formula motherboard review - Product Showcase

The Z270 motherboard will get you six Intel chipset based SATA 6 Gb/s storage ports. Combined in here are two M.2 PCI Express slots using x4 PCIe lanes, giving these (Optane compatible) ports not 10 GB/sec but 32 GB/sec of performance. There are plenty of USB 3.0 and 3.1 ports available through internal motherboard connectors, some Intel based, some Asmedia ASM2142 powered. BTW the industry calls USB 3.0 / USB 3.1 Gen 1 these days, a little misleading TBH. USB 3.1 Gen 2 would be the new and proper 10 Gbps connectors. This motherboard has both gen 1 and 2 connectors and thus you get at least 5 Gbps speed.
 

Here we can see the four DIMM slots which offer support for dual-channel DDR4 memory up to even 4000 MHz (OC). If you activate the XMP 2.0 profile in the BIOS, your memory will be automatically configured for you at its maximum clock speed and recommended voltage. You can install a maximum of 64 GB in total. Again, XMP 2.0 must be supported, we'll show you this setup running at 2133 and extremely high XMP frequency measurements later on in the article.

 
To the right you can spot a physical power and reset button as well as a diagnostic POST LED. You'll also find lots of fan headers hidden all over the board. I counted at least seven of them with a dedicated one for LCS coolers as well.
  

Yep, you may unleash some more power with graphics configurations. Support for up to 3 full length discrete VGA cards. Mind you, we can only recommend you to go with 2x multi-GPU. Three cards would bog down the 3rd card at a x4 link where two cards would both get x8 Gen 3.0 PCIe links. ASUS is doing it right, they include a High-Bandwidth SLI connector.

So if you are installing an M.2 SSD, you do not have to worry about the PCB color anymore as you can hide it. Designed to be compatible with any length of M.2 SSD. Look at the lower latch.
  

Simply pop the M.2 SSD in and close the lid. ASUS includes just one location where you can hide it, see that lower connector? The other, well, ehm... have a peek at the photo below.
  

 
Yup, that is a vertically mounted M.2 unit. You will receive a mounting kit here, but quite frankly I cannot for the life of me consider using an M.2 unit that way. Then again, for some quick action it might be handy.