Gadgetory

so this is a fairly exciting new product from masseuse this is the latest conditioner one of the latest two additions in their republic of gamers line of motherboards this is the Maximus three extreme so the other one that's launching at the same time is the rampage three extreme which is the x58 version and then this is the p55 version so that means that it is compatible with I'm gonna i discarded my remote layer which was a bad move okay so that means it is compatible with intel core i7 in core i5 so those are the Elgin LGA 1156 variants it is sli ready crossfire ready and let's see what Zeus has to say for themselves on the back or on the inside I should say on the motherboard box so first of all it has rog connect our energy connect allows you to plug in and overclocked we get the hardcore way okay that's not very explanatory i think it's a little little module though that you plug into the board okay so USB bios flash back don't worry about scratching so rather than having a dual BIOS feature like their competitors what they've done is they've actually worked in a way to just plug in a USB thumb drive and recover your BIOS that way clever because then you can cover whatever recover whatever one you want extreme engine digi+ this one I've never heard of say hello to the next generation designed and then they have a picture of the CPU socket area so I'm guessing is something to do with power delivery ok and then PC bluetooths overwhelm your acknowledgment with wireless overclocking experience let me read that again overwhelm your acknowledgment with wireless overclocking experience okay it includes a copy of 3dmark Vantage as well as a copy of kaspersky antivirus which may or may not be a trial version I don't know alright and then we have a window into the board itself so you can see that it has their their typical excellent look which you always expect from their republic of gamers line it's always going to look awesome on the back we find most of the same information we found inside there except for a couple other things it gives us a big list of specs and I'm not going to bother to tell you that and like what concluded because I'm about to open it up and tell you about it so let's get this box opened up and have a look and the board so I'm going to pull out there's two two boxes inside here there's two black boxes side by side so I'm going to pull out the accessories one first and we'll have a look at that to start with here alright so just put the board aside for a minute and let's see what we find inside the accessories box we're gonna have to figure out how to get it open first and then we'll be good to go Wow lots of accessories that's the thing about these high-end boards is you get a nice big accessory package with them that you don't typically see on the lower end models so first of all we have an i/o shield all right typical looking out shield it has a Seuss's a fluffy shiny metal thing on the back alright then we have a USB cable USB email to a male then we have a USB and esata bracket that you can install in your case if you don't already have those enough of them at the back then we have the Maximus three extreme user guide as well as a couple things okay first of all you've got the driver CD which also includes a copy of 3dmark Vantage on it the keys on the back some of these they're not going to show you that and then on in here we have a bunch of stickers to label your SATA cables so you can label them with hard drive one hard drive to optical drive one optical drive to and then you can write a little descriptive thing for it that's pretty nice then you've got a huge republic of gamers k sticker this thing is enormous there's my hand for scale so you can throw that on like your side window if you so desire although most people probably wouldn't desire but for those who do desire it is there that's the thing about you know a big accessory packages just in case it's there all right you've got an optional fan for cooling the MOSFETs next thing we find is the I think this is the ROG connect module or something well maybe this is the bluetooth thing you know what I don't know okay next we have a 3-way SLI bridge looks just like that looks like any other 3-way SLI bridge so I guess that die answers that question this board does have support for 3-way SLI and then you have just a normal flexible SLI bridge for two-way SLI they include a couple of zip ties as well as the asuste q connect in case you have a really old chassis that doesn't have the block of connectors they have included a wide variety of SATA cables here so you've got one right angle and one straight in each of these four packs so as sous has included eight SATA cables for you with this board they're black so they'll look good then you've got three temperature probes which I'm assuming you can plug into the board somewhere and then finally a crossfire bridge so they've included it looks like a it might be a little bit longer than a standard crossfire original though it's hard to tell cuz I'm doing that off memory so yeah it's a typical for the motherboard manufacturer to include a crossfire bridge but I guess it doesn't cost them a whole lot because most manufacturers actually includes the crossfire bridge with the with the video card not yet the motherboard so I mean I guess the last thing they want you to do is buy a Maximus three extreme you know high-end motherboard for your build and you know not have some part that you're going to need to put together your computer so a sous has kind of thought of everything on this one let's get the motherboard itself out of the box here just taking off the plastic cover and I remember having a bit of trouble getting a motherboard out of one of these Republican gamers boxes of something and it's gonna bend it just right yeah I got to figure it out this time alright so let's have a look at the board layout itself so this is a p55 board so that means you're going to find an LGA 1156 socket so it means you've got support for core i3 to i5 core i7 something to note about any core i3 s or Core i5 dual courses that you are not going to have support for the onboard video built-in because there's no onboard video ports on the back of the board the p55 chipset does not support that particular feature where as the age 55 and age 57 do okay you've got your your MOSFET cooling here connected by one heat pipe to your northbridge cooler and then that goes down by an via another P pipe to your southbridge cooler and I'm guessing there's probably a say 26 as well as a USB 3 fo no chip set under there somewhere actually the USB chip sup might be somewhere else it doesn't really matter okay over on the side once again standard features you've got your ddr3 dual channel slots and they use the these unique seuss memory slots where you can see that only one side actually moves back and forth the other side is just fixed so what you do is you take the module you slide it in this way and then you put it down and then clip it into place so that's kind of a neat feature that they've built into a lot of their newer motherboards on the very high end so then up here we've got a four pin sorry a 4-pin an 8-pin cpu connector right where it belongs at the top left of the board as well as a bios reset switch right there this there that is awesome because you don't need a vile switch on the back well mind you you have one but having one here is so much smarter than all the guys who are putting them wait a minute is that even a bios switch no I don't think it is that does something else because yeah they've already got one here they've got one on the back of the board and then they've got another BIOS switch down here at the bottom right of the board which is also a fairly good location for it because that's the kind of place that you can actually access even when you've got a couple graphics cards installed which is what I was about to say about this location no Q reset yeah all right okay so let's keep going down the board we've got our 24-pin connector right where it belongs on the right-hand edge and then we have a go button q led all right up here we have probit so that is where you can stick and a multimeter to find out what the voltages are going to the CPU CPU PLL I integrated memory controller the RAM and PCH and then you've got a couple ground connections there that's pretty nice and then Q LED tells you CPU drm vga boot device maybe it's some kind of error reporting you know what they've actually include a lot of features with this board that I've never seen before and I'm I've been caught a little bit off my guard here all right well why don't we keep just keep on chugging along so download the bottom side of the board here we have to say de three so that's a 26 gigabit per second as well as six say 22 so that's a 23 gigabit per second running off the chipset and then we have the plx bridge chip which a sous says is the best solution for running say 26 and USB 3.0 because it gives them access to the full bandwidth that they need okay then we've got down at the bottom this motherboard has it appears all four pin pwm fan connectors built in so it has a ton of them actually why don't I pull back and have let you have a look at the whole board and I'll show you where they all know there's one here one here that's two three four five six seven eight eight four pin pwm fan connector so you could potentially plug a cpu fan you know and then seven case fans if you felt like it okay so let's keep on going here here's all your front panel connectors as well as one more say to port and that's probably running off the same chipset as the one powering the eSATA port on the back you have one two three four five pci express 16x physical connectors but not all of these are actually going to run at pci express 16x because with the p55 chipset you don't actually have access to that mini PCI Express Lanes down here on the bottom we have a suz's stylized start and restart buttons as well as a molex connector so right there on the bottom of the board you got a molex connector I'm going to go ahead and assume that that's for supplementary power for the PCI Express slots I mean if you're plugging in you know you could potentially do one two three four Fergie's if you had a yeah if you wanted to turn this into like a folding board then yeah you definitely need some supplementary power alright then they've got another supplementary power connector up here there's another molex connector right there on the motherboard and then get around to the back panel so here you're going to find two USB 2.0 ports a ps2 keyboard port then you've got a CMOS reset button and that actually is one then you have a you a couple USB 3.0 ports you can tell by the blue color coding then you have optical audio out esatto firewire two more USB 2.0 ports two more USB 2.0 this is actually kind of confusing they've gone in color coded USB to fight all act or red and then USB 3.0 so yeah that's okay I mean as long as you remember blue is USB 3.0 and you should be good you got gigabit ethernet then you have the rog link as well as the USB cable that connects to it then you have 7.1 audio and that pretty much wraps up my unboxing and overview of the Maximus three extreme