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Welcome to my unboxing and first look at the cream of the cream of Z78 boards.
This is the Maximus 6 Extreme from ASUS. It includes everything except the
kitchen sink, but it's okay because you can probably get rid of your kitchen
sink and swap it out with one of these guys. This is the OC panel and it's got
a lot of cool functionality that we're going to get into throughout this video.
The motherboard comes with full versions of Kasperski and Demon Tools, which I
think is a really cool value ad for enthusiasts who buy it. On the outside
of the box, ASUS does a really good job of spelling out exactly what makes the
board special. So, there's the OC panel,
the MPCIE combo 2, as well as the Extreme Engine Dig Plus 3 technologies
covered on the inside of the front of the box, which we'll cover in much more
detail once we get the board out. And then on the back, they've got pretty
much the same stuff. They talk about four-way SLI and Crossfire, as well as
some of the connectivity on the board. So, let's go ahead and get this bad boy
opened up. Now, the Extreme board is positioned more for overclockers than
specifically for gamers. So, you're going to find some of the features and
some of the places where ASUS has spent a lot of time and a lot of money
developing this board are more beneficial to those guys who are looking
to push for every last megahertz of
frequency on their CPU and not so much
towards guys who are just going to kind of dial it into a safe setting and leave
it there. which isn't to say that it won't have safe profiles. It's just, you
know, you don't get things like a more advanced uh separated part of the PCB
for your audio solution like you do on a formula grade board with the Xreme. So,
let's go ahead and open up the box of accessories, of which there are many.
We'll start with the Q connector, which allows you to more easily plug in your front panel connectors. A padded labeled
IO shield in the traditional ASUS fashion. We have the custom sleeved
cable for the OC panel, which plugs directly into the board and then into
the bottom of the OC panel unit. A user's guide, which you should pretty
much look at online if you need it. These are cool. Labels for your SATA
cables so you can tell which one is which at both ends, as well as their
There we go. For ROG Connect, they've got a USB A to A cable. So, if you don't
want to use the OC panel, then you can actually plug into a separate computer
like a laptop and control settings from there. Three-way SLI bridge, four-way
SLI bridge, two-way SLI bridge, all
black, all matte, all gorgeous. And finally, a Crossfire bridge that is in
the same style. Now, this is really nice. Check this out. Republic of Gamers
decal for your case that unlike most case decals actually has some heft to it
and feels solid and attaches with a magnet so that it doesn't it's not a
one-time use thing. We have the MPCIE
combo port MPCIE combo 2 rather excuse
me module that sits on the MPCIE port at the top of the board. More on that in a
moment. It has both uh Wi-Fi dualband AC
as well as Bluetooth 4.0 know builtin eight SATA 36 Gbit per second cables
which crazily oh no 10. There you go. You got enough for every single port on
the board. And finally, an external magnetic antenna for the built-in AC
wireless. Last but not least, we have a
5 and a/4 in bay adapter for the OC panel itself. So you can put the LCD in
the front of your case if you don't want to have a little separate thing sitting
next to you or you're not operating on an open test bench. which leads us to
our second black box. The first thing we see inside of which is the OC panel.
Now, the OC panel can work in a number of different ways. And I'll start with
one of the most basic things in that is the fact that this LCD can tilt up so
that it can be mounted in that five and a quarter inch adapter that I showed you
before, giving you access to things like your level up button, which turns your
overclock on and off with a hardware switch here, power button, fan control,
and all kinds of other cool functionality that can be enabled with
this device. We'll get into more depth with it once we've had a chance to be
hands-on and really play with it when we're doing our Haswell overclocking
guide. So stay tuned for that guys. It's going to be awesome. The other way to
use it is sitting on your desk popped out like this where it looks a lot like
how many guys would have a multimeter or
something like a temperature sensor sitting next to them while they're
overclocking. Speaking of temperature sensors, this is very cool. It actually
uses their subzero sense technology is what they're calling it to detect
temperatures that are as low as liquid nitrogen. So this is suitable not only
for making changes to your clock speeds or whatever else, but also for actually
monitoring those. So it's a serious tool meant for people who are actually at the
top of the field in terms of overclocking. And extreme mode has other
cool stuff about it like VGA hotwire which allows you to actually directly
overvolt supported ASUS graphics cards with this unit as well. And I mean
there's all this cool stuff here too. Check this out. So inside here you've
got see you've also got a SATA power in in addition to the data which allows you
to hook up some uh four pin PWM fans that you can run off the OC panel itself
as well as control things like slow mode. What slow mode does is sometimes
liquid nitrogen overclockers don't want the PC to boot up as fast as possible.
So slow mode is there for that pretty much more than anything else. as well as
some other really cool things in here, including there you go, direct voltage
checkpoints that are again built into the board, but also built into the OC
panel itself. Not everybody needs that functionality though. I got briefed on
this thing by Andre Yang himself. And so what he did is he helped design it. If
you guys know overclocking, I hope you've heard of Andre Yang. And he also
spent a lot of time with it once it was done creating profiles that less
advanced users can just implement. So, all you really have to do is go, okay,
well, I want to be able to, you know, monitor my fans and monitor my temperatures and make small tuning
adjustments by pressing the buttons on it, and that's all fine and good and cool, but at the end of the day, you
know, maybe what I end up doing is plugging in one of Andre Yang's profiles
and going at it from there. So, it has a more basic mode available to you as
well, which leads us to the board itself. Now, the first thing I noticed
about it might seem weird to you, but that's that it's in a standard ATX form
factor this time around. no extra width which we do normally see on the extreme
level boards. Next up, and I mean this is okay, overclockers are always looking
at what has ASUS done in terms of power delivery to make it so you can eek every
last bit out of the CPU. So, we see something we've seen for a couple
generations now, and that's dual CPU power connectors. In this case, an 8 pin
and a 4 pin. And we also see a completely redesigned voltage delivery
system. We've got their super premium 10K black metallic solid state
capacitors that ASUS figures are good for up to five times the lifetime of
what you'd see from a typical cap and are capable of operating at up to 20%
higher temperature tolerances. But that's not the only thing that's optimized temperature- wise here. The
NexF MOSFETs operate at 90% efficiency,
meaning very little power is lost to heat. And their Blackwing chokes, due to
the design of the wing on them, are able to operate up to 3 to 5 degrees cooler.
So the idea is that while it's completely overbuilt in terms of how
much power it can deliver to the CPU, it is not sacrificing any of the efficiency
and cool operation that you would want from the power delivery system. Now the
CPU socket itself is an LG 1150 socket supporting the latest fourth generation
Intel Core series processors code named Haswell. And over here you're going to
find four DDR3 dual channel memory slots. Now, something notable about
Haswell is that much higher frequencies of DDR3 are supported. However, once you
start to overclock the CPU, um, you know, the DDR3 2800 MHz to 3 GHz speeds
that you'll typically get on a H on a good Haswell chip are going to start to
go down to the point where once you're overclocking the CPU to the max, your
RAM overclocking options are going to be somewhat more limited. Up in the top
right, we've got a post LED next to this
is pretty cool. So, ASUS has built a custom three pin, fourpin slash,
whatever the heck this thing is, CPU fan
header. So, what it does is it actually has a separate little sensor in there
that tells the com the motherboard whether you're using a three pin or a
four pin fan and then will adjust the way that it controls your CPU fan
profile accordingly without any intervention from the user. Very, very
cool. Also up here at the top right, we've got one of those slow mode buttons
that's built directly into the board if you're not using the OC panel. Start and
reset switches built in on board. More voltage checkpoints for pretty much
everything you could imagine. So you can use your high-end multimeter to check all that stuff. I love this feature,
guys. DIP switches for turning on and off individual PCI Express slots on the
board, especially once you've got a bunch of water cooled GPUs in there.
Diagnosing a problem with a graphics card can be an absolute nightmare. So,
being able to turn them off one at a time to figure out which one's causing the issue without taking the cards
physically out is awesome. The memo K button uh helps you diagnose non-post
situations where memory with aggressive profiles might not post correctly. And
our 24 pin connectors in its ideal location along the right hand edge of
the board along with a USB 3 connector in its ideal location along the right
hand edge of the board. We've got two more. There they are. are Blackwing
chokes. So, those are the two that are providing power to the memory. Remember
guys, with memory frequencies going way the heck up, it's going to be helpful to
be able to deliver as clean power to it as you possibly can. Over here, we have
six SATA 36 Gbit per second ports powered by the Intel chipset and four
powered by an AS Media chipset, giving you a total of 10. And it should be
noted that if you use the MPCIE combo NGF slot or M.2 two slot up in the top
left that one of these ports will be disabled. Now, I want to talk about that
for a moment now. So, they include a module here. So, this is mini PCIe and
USB 2 connectivity that's in here. So, they include a module. There you go.
That gives you Bluetooth 4.0 as well as wireless 802.11 AC. However, it should
be noted that it does support the M.2
standard. So, you would be able to plug an SSD in there as well instead of
having it plugged into a SATA port. Down here at the very bottom of the board,
we've got a BIOS switch as well as our
front panel connectors, two USB 2.0 connectors, the ROG external connector
for the OC panel, a Thunderbolt header, meaning you can use an add-in
Thunderbolt card to add Thunderbolt connectivity to this board, a direct key
button, the fast boot button, as well as
your audio header. Now, I mentioned before it doesn't have a similarly
highgrade audio solution like what you might find on a formula board, but I
think the assumption from ASUS is if you are spending this much money on a
motherboard and the associated hardware that goes with it, you're probably
buying something like a Feebis to put in it anyway. All right. Now, this is one
of the things that really gets me geeking out about this board. We've got
four PCI Express 16x slots. Okay, fine. There's another one here that's wired
for 8X. And then we've got a PCI Express 4X slot. But what's unique about these
is the flexibility that they afford. Normally on a nonX79 or a non uh premium
tier platform from Intel, you've either got 16x or 8x8x or 44. I I don't think
they even support 444. Or you'll have some kind of um splitter lane spplitting
chip that will allow you to achieve higher bandwidth but at a at a latency
penalty that usually doesn't really result in better performance. What ASUS
has done here is they've given you the option, okay, to either run 16x
8x 8x in two slots without using any any
splitters or intermediary bridge chips so you can get that low latency if you
don't need the extra bandwidth or 8x 8x 16x 8x using a PLX chip so that you can
achieve four-way SLI on the board and you'll have to take that latency hit for
running so many graphics cards, but at least This way, people who are running
one or two don't have to deal with that. Love that. And if you're running a ton
of graphics card, I would recommend using the easy plug right here. That
does provide some additional power to the board so that you don't risk burning
out your 24 pin, which is otherwise relied on for all the power to those
components other than the plugins that go in the back of the video card. Now,
while the hardware for audio might not be anything special compared to the
formula grade board, the software is still right up there. So, they've got
their new Supreme FX3 software, which includes what they're calling sound
radar, which gives you a visual overlay of where sounds are coming from in game,
uh, without actually even relying on your ears at all, which would be, I mean, the, uh, the implications are very
cool, particularly for people who don't hear well or have hearing loss in one ear, being able to take advantage of
positional audio like that. This BIOS switch is a hardware switch that allows
you to, well, switch between the two physical BIOS chips that are integrated
on the board. So, even in the event of a bad flash, you can quickly and easily
switch to a completely different profile, and you can use it to segment
your experimentation profile from your daily driving profile. Finally, on the
back of the board, we've got a SMOS clear button, ROG connect button, two
USB 2.0 ports, six USB 3.0 ports, a
gigabit Ethernet port provided by an Intel chipset that's going to give you
less overhead, less throughput, less overhead, and more throughput. We've
also got DisplayPort and HDMI ports supporting up to 4K display outs,
optical audio and 7.1 audio out. And last but not least, and I really do
still like to see this, a PS2 keyboard mouse combo port. Sometimes PS2 just
does work the best. On the back of the board, we've got a couple more coolers
for the MOSFETs. And that is pretty much all she wrote about the Maximus 6
Extreme. Guys, tune in for our overclocking guide on Haswell, which is
going to feature this board and the OC panel. Do like the video, do share the
video, and as always, don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more
unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos.