Gallery - the ASUS Maximum III Gene

Socket LGA 1156 folks. Meet the new socket design for Core i5 processors. Twelve Phase power design.

• Eight phase CPU power
• Two phase VTT power
• Two phase memory power

Everything nicely passively cooled, we like no noise products alright. Below the processor socket you can spot the dual-channel DIMM slots, DDR3. Let's go over there and have a better look..

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 i5 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 i5, that will be alot of bandwidth.

Up-to 16GB may be installed and the board will actually support 2133 MHz straight out of the BIOS, as Borat would say .. Naiceee! What you'll notice is that everything is position really well. But 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. [Ed - At last manufacturers listen, or employed gamers who gave "internal feedback" !]

In total we get 7x SATA II ports and then at the back panel we again see one eSATA ports managed by a JMicron controller. The little red button you can see is a recover button, previously called MemOK. If during an overclock you mess up your memory settings and the system won't post. You flick this switch and the BIOS will return the memory to a safe state, while NOT clearing the BIOS.

We flip the board around again 90 degrees and stumble into internal low-level connectivity. Front panel headers and more USB headers. Let's zoom in a little.

Lovely to see, a power on/off button and reset micro switch, handy if you are in an overclocking spree.

Okay last photo in this large slideshow aka photo gallery. Check it out, three x4 PCIe slot, one PCI slot, two x16 PCIe graphics slots (rev 2.0). This motherboard has a SLI license and thus is compatible. If you use two graphics cards the chipset will however split two x8 PCIe lanes towards each slot. Crossfire obviously will work as well, no questions asked there.