so this is a fairly exciting new product from isus this is the latest edition or
one of the latest two editions in their Republic of gamer line of motherboards
this is the Maximus 3 Extreme so the other one that's launching at the same
time is the Rampage 3 Extreme which is the x58 version and then this is the p55
version so that means that it is compatible with I'm going to I discarded
my remote there which was a bad move okay so that means it is compatible with
Intel Core i7 and core i5 so the those are the LG LGA 1156 variants it is SLI
ready Crossfire ready and let's see what
Aus has to say for themselves on the
back or on the inside I should say of the motherboard box so first of all it
has Rog connect Rog connect allows you to plug in and overclock tweak get the
hardcore way okay that's not very
explanatory I think it's a little um little module though that you plug into
the board okay so USB BIOS flashback no worry of BIOS crash anytime so rather
than having a dual BIOS feature like their competitors what they've done is
they've actually worked in a way to just plug in a USB thumb drive and recover
your BIOS that way clever because then you can cover whatever recover whatever
one you want Extreme Engine Digi plus this one I've never heard of say hello
to the Next Generation design and then they have a picture of the CPU socket
area so I'm guessing it's something to do with power delivery okay and then PC
Bluetooth overwhelm your acknowled M with wireless overclocking
experience let me read that again
overwhelm your acknowledgement with
wireless overclocking experience okay it includes a copy of 3D
Mark Vantage as well as a copy of kasperski antivirus uh which may or may
not be a trial version I don't know all right and then we have a window into the
board itself so you can see that it has their uh their typical excellent look
which you always expect from their Republic of Gamers line it's always
going to look awesome on the back we find uh most of the same information we
found on the inside there except for a couple other things it gives us a big
list of specs and I'm not going to bother to tell you that and like what's
included because I'm about to open it up and tell you about it so let's get this
box opened up and have a look at the board so I'm going to pull out there's
two two boxes inside here there's uh two black boxes side by side so I'm going to
pull out the accessories one first and we'll have a look at that start with
here all right so I'll just put the board aside for a minute and let's see
what we find inside the accessories
box I'm going to have to figure out how to get it open first and then we'll be
good to go wow lots of accessories that's the
thing about these high-end boards is you get a nice big accessory package with
them that you don't typically see on the lower end model so first of all we have
an IO Shield all right typical looking IO Shield it has A's uh fluffy shiny
metal thing on the back all right then we have a USB cable USB a mail to a mail
then we have a USB and eSATA bracket
that you can install in your case if you don't already have those enough of them
at the back then we have the Maximus 3 Extreme user guide as well as oh a
couple things okay first of all you've got um the driver CD which also includes
a copy of 3D Mark Vantage on it the keys on the back so I'm obviously not going
to show you that and then on in here we
have a bunch of stickers to label your SATA cables so you can label them with
hard drive 1 hard drive two optical drive 1 optical drive two and then you
can write a little descriptive thing for it that's pretty nice then you've got a
huge Republic of Gamers case sticker this thing is enormous there's my hand
for scale so you could throw that on like your side window if you so desired
although most people probably wouldn't desire but for those who do desire it is
there that's the thing about you know a big accessory packag is just in case
it's there all right you've got an optional fan for cooling the
mosfets next thing we find is
the I think this is the Rog connect
module or something oh maybe this is the Bluetooth
thing you know what I don't know okay
next we have a three-way SLI Bridge
looks just like that looks like any other three-way SLI Bridge so I guess
that answers that question this board does have support for three-way SLI and
then you have just a normal flexible SLI bridge for two-way SLI they include a
couple of uh zip ties as well as the assus Q connect in case you have a
really old chassis that doesn't have the the block of connectors they've included
a wide variety of SATA cables here so you've got one right angle and one
straight in each of these four packs so ASUS has included eight SATA cables for
you with this board they're black so they'll look good then you've got three
temperature probes which I'm assuming you can plug
into the board somewhere and then finally a crossfire Bridge so they've
included it looks like a it might be a little bit longer than a standard
Crossfire Bridge although it's hard to tell because I'm doing that off memory
so um yeah it's atypical for the
motherboard manufacturer to include a crossfire bridge but I guess it doesn't
cost them a whole lot cuz most manufacturers actually include the
crossfire Bridge with the uh with the
video card not with the motherboard so I
mean I guess the last thing they want you to do is buy a Maximus 3 Extreme you
know high-end motherboard for your build and you know not have some part that
you're going to need to put together your computer so ASUS has kind of
thought of everything on this one let's get the motherboard itself out of the
box here take just taking off the plastic cover and I remember having a
bit of trouble getting a motherboard out of one of these um Republic of Gamers
boxes at some point you just got to bend it just right yeah I got it figured out
this time all right so let's have a look at the board layout itself so this is a
p-55 board so that means you're going to find an LGA 1156 socket so that means
you got support for core I3 Core i5 core i7 something to note about any cor i3s
or core i5 dual course is that you are not going to have support for the
Onboard video built in because there's no Onboard video ports on the back of
the board the p-55 chipset does not support that particular feature whereas
the h55 and h57 do okay you've got your
uh your mosfet cooling here connected by one heat pipe to your North Bridge
cooler and then that goes down by via another heat pipe to your South Bridge
cooler and I'm guessing there's probably a SATA 6 as well as a USB 3.0 chipset
under there somewhere actually the USB chipset might be somewhere else it
doesn't really matter okay over on the side once again standard features you've
got your DDR3 dual Channel slots and they use the these unique assus memory
slots where you can see that only one side actually moves back and forth the
other side is just fixed so what you do
is you take the module you slide it in this way and then you put it down and
then clip it into place so that's kind of a neat feature that they've built into a lot of their newer motherboards
on the very high end so then up here we've got a four pin sorry a four pin
an8 pin CPU connector right where it belongs at the top left of the board as
well as a BIOS reset switch right there this there that is awesome because you
don't need a bio switch on the back well mind you you have one but having one
here is so much smarter than all the guys who are putting them wait a minute
is that even a bio switch no I don't think it is that does something else
because yeah they've already got one here they've got one on the back of the
board and then they've got another bio switch down here at the bottom right of
the board which is also a fairly good location for it because that's the kind
of place that you can actually access even when you've got aoup graphics cards
installed which is what I was about to say about this location no Q reset yeah
all right okay so let's keep going down the board we've got our 24 pin connector
right where it belongs on the right hand Edge and then we have a Go Button
qled all right up here we have probit so
that is where you can stick a a multimeter to find out what the voltages
are going to the CPU uh CPU PLL I
integrated memory controller the RAM PC CH and then you've got a couple ground
connections there that's pretty nice and then uh qled tells you CPU dram VGA boot
device H maybe it's some kind of error reporting you know what they've actually
included a lot of features with this board that I've never seen before and
I'm uh I've been caught a little bit uh off my guard here all right well why
don't we keep just keep on chugging along so down at the bottom side of the
board here we have two SATA 3 so that's SATA 6 gbit per second as well as six
SATA 2 so that's SATA 3 GB per second running off the chipset and then we have
the plx bridge chip which assus says is
the best solution for running SATA 6 and USB 3.0 because it gives them access to
the full bandwidth that they need okay and then we've got down at the bottom
this motherboard has it appears all four pin pwm fan connectors built in so it
has a ton of them actually why don't I pull back and have let you have a look
at the whole board and I'll show you where they all are there's one here one here that's 2 3
4 5 6
7 eight eight four pin pwm fan
connectors so you could potentially plug a CPU fan um you know and then seven
case fans if you felt like it okay so let's keep on going here here's all your
front panel connectors as well as one more SATA port and that's probably
running off the same chipset as the one powering the EA port on the back you
have 1 2 3 4 5 five PCI Express 16x
physical connectors but not all of these are actually going to run at PCI Express
16x um because with the p55 chipset you
don't actually have access to that many PCI Express Lanes down here on the
bottom we have ASUS's uh stylized start
and restart buttons as well as a Molex
connector so right there on the bottom of the board you got a Molex connector
I'm going to go ahead and assume that that's for supplementary power for the
PCI Express slots I mean if you're plugging in you know you could
potentially do one two three four fmes if you had a yeah if
you wanted to turn this into like a folding board then uh yeah you
definitely need some supplementary power all right then they've got another
supplementary power connector up here there's another Molex connector right
there on the motherboard and then let's get around to the back panel so here
you're going to find two USB 2.0 ports a PS2 keyboard Port then you've got a SE
reset button and that actually is one then you have a a couple USB 3.0 ports
you can tell by the blue color coding then you have optical audio out ESAT
fire wire two more USB 2.0 ports two
more USB 2.0 ports you know this is actually kind of confusing they've gone
in colorcoded USB 2.0 black or red and
then USB 3.0 blue so yeah that's okay I
mean as long as you remember blue is USB 3.0 then you should be good you got
gigabit Ethernet then you have the um
Rog link as well as the USB cable that connects to it then you have 7.1 audio
and that pretty much wraps up my unboxing and overview of the Maximus 3
Extreme