Gallery - the ASUS Maximum III Extreme

Once we flip the board around, once more we stumble into the DIMM slots, DDR3 of course. It really is a bit of a shame that Intel decided to leave Triple channel memory only available to Core i7 related products. Then again, the new point to point interface on the Core i5/i7 series will maximize bandwidth, and even at dual-channel with Core i3/i5/i7, that will be a lot of bandwidth.

Up-to 16GB may be installed and the board will actually support 2200 MHz straight out of the BIOS though overclocked. XMP profiles are detected and activated optionally a swell.  What you'll notice is that everything is positioned really well.

BTW do you see that jumper just above the "Go Button" ? That's in fact a cold bug switch. Die-hard overclockers cool down to way below sub-zero with liquid nitrogen. Typically when an Intel processor hits -90 Degrees C, you can't boot anymore. This is what is called the "Cold bug" in enthusiast terminology. Well, switch the jumper and that issues becomes a non-issue. Very nice. We'll discuss the several micro buttons separately by the way.

Let's move onward to the left side where we stumble into a bunch of SATA connectors with the 90 degree bend so they will not block graphics cards. In total we get 8x SATA II ports with at the back panel we again see one eSATA ports managed by a craptacular JMicron controller (recently we tried an SSD on the JMicron controller and we lost nearly half performance over the regular Intel ICH10 controller.

The two RED colored SATA ports will get you a rigid e-peen though, these are all new SATA6G ports. They are managed by a Marvell controller and what ASUS does so beautifully .. they implemented it right. Check out the next photo:

Located close to the SATA 6G ports is an extra PLX creating (needed) bandwidth for the Marvell storage controller. I did not check specifically but it will add either x4 or x8 lanes of PCIe bandwidth, giving the Marvell SATA6G controller plenty of bandwidth while not hogging PCIe lanes from for your graphics cards.

Good stuff !