ASUS has announced a new mATX motherboard crammed full of functionality, although the same we have seen before. Maximus IV Gene-Z/Gen3 is largely the same board as Maximus IV Gene-Z, besides it sports PCI Express 3.0.
ASUS’ new motherboard, is a fresher version of Maximus IV Gene-Z with support for PCI Express 3.0. While we have decided not to cover it, the manufacturers have had a sandbox war about the new interface, PCI Express 3.0. ASUS has kept it fairly cool and, but slowly launched motherboards with genuine PCI Express 3.0 support that will work with Ivy Bridge.
The motherboard sports Intel Z68 with support for technologies for Intel Smart Response Technology that is a SSD cache technology by Intel. The board sports two PCI Express 3.0 x16 slots, backwards compatible with PCI Express 2.0, and one PCI Express 2.0 x4. It supports NVIDIA SLI and AMD CrossfireX, and Lucid Virtu that automatically turns off a graphics card to rely on the integrated graphics processor.
We get SATA 3.0 Gb/s SATA ports and two SATA 6.0 Gb/s ports from Intel’s chipset. The board supports four DDR3-2200, ahd have several of ASUS’ own little tweaks. This includes ROG Web Storage, ROG Connect, Extreme Engine Digi+, Mem TweakIt, AI Charger+ and more. The audio processor is Supreme X-FI 2audio.
On the back we find ports for most thing. A number of USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0, eSATA, PS/2, Ethernet, analog and digital audio ports and a small button for BIOS reset. ASUS has not revealed the launch date, or a price.
