ASUS ROG Maximus X Apex review - Product Showcase

 
When we place the motherboard at an angle we see the rather familiar socket LGA1151. It will support Coffee Lake procs, these are referred to as the 8th generation Core series processors. If you count along with me, it appears to feature a 8 phase mode design for the CPU and two additional phases for memory. 

 
Storage ports then -- ASUS is equipping the board with four SATA3 ports. Add to that the two M.2 slots on DIMM.2, this is all a little limited for a motherboard in this price category.

Albeit the DIMM.2 slot for the M2 SSDs is a bit peculiar for a solution, it does work well. Above you can see the PCIe Gen3 x4 based fast card, delivering up to 32 Gb/s data transfer speed per connector, the M.2 solution supports RAID modes. There are two M.2 SSD slots available on the card, one at the front and one at the backside.

So the lower black DIMM slot is used for DIMM.2 and as stated on the previous page the upper two DIMM slots support single and dual channel with support up-to DDR4 4500 (O.C.) and start at 2133 MHz memory modules. 2 x DDR4 DIMM sockets can sport up-to 32 GB of system memory as a maximum. We recommend something in the middle, a nice 3200 MHz kit, for example, is a good balance in perf/price ratio. Volume, in the end, matters more than frequency, keep that in mind.