Asus Maximus IV Extreme Preview
 

The first board in the Sandy Bridge series with the Republic of Gamers moniker is the Maximus IV Extreme. This motherboard looks jam-packed with features, and we’d expect nothing less from a ROG product.


The red and black aside, ASUS are attempting to pushing the boat out for overclockers. Of immediate notice is beside the dual-channel DDR3 slots – alongside the power and reset buttons are a set of four switches, designed to enable and disable the PCIe slots as required. Beside these are a set of eight voltage readout points, allowing the monitoring of the various DRAM, NF200, PCH and the CPU voltages across the board. A switch is also present labelled ‘LN2_MODE’, which offers various questions as to what it does, but we suspect at least one of these features is to remove the overcurrent protection when the processor is under liquid nitrogen. One point of humorous mention is that there are three LEDs next to the DDR3 slots, one of them labelled ‘DDR_CRAZY’.


http://www.anandtech.com/show/4019/a...motherboards/3