Asus Maximus III Gene Motherboard Review.

Introduction
Buying a motherboard at the moment is quite a difficult task since, in terms about performance, there is hardly any to choose between the very best contenders. Brand loyalty is a person route but leaves the feeling that something good might missed out on through absence of awareness of the many offerings. Manufacturers have had a tricky time and many have been forced straight into an "arms race" of adding more and more features to make their boards stand out. A recent example certainly is the trend towards putting considerable amounts of copper onboard using little performance gain to indicate to for it but at a disproportionate cost. Why did they do it? Simply because people choose motherboards in line with reading the specifications inside a quantitative fashion. We think that far greater value for that customer can be acquired by putting features (software and hardware) inside package that gives these folks tangible benefits.
ASUS are a prime example of this. Their strategy is to lead through innovation and not just follow the herd. Readers will already be familiar with products such as the Eee range and also other home entertainment products they've developed. The ROG (Republic about Gamers) brand is rapidly gaining popularity with extreme gaming plus overclocking workshops and seminars being held during the course of countries. The selection of prizes provided at these events presents how closely ASUS understand the requirements and aspirations of their audience. We've been impressed for some time now with the feature list of ASUS motherboards and think it's now time to review them with a concentration on those features and not quite a plethora of benchmarks comparing 20+ boards that affect perform within 1% of each and every other. Today the board in question is the Maximus 3 Gene, a flagship plug 1156 product for Intel i5 along with i7 (8XX series) processors.
Board Features
A brief summary for the main features follows: Removed to save space - please relate to www. asus. com for more details
Board Layout
The box comes in a nice package this prominently displays the ROG logo showing this is an enthusiast not to mention gamers motherboard.
It genuinely is Windows 7 ready and everything was noticed correctly during our 64-bit Windows 7 7 Pro setup. Installing the additional drivers and utilities that come with the enclosed CD continues to be highly recommended though.
The onboard X-Fi supports EAX have a look at. 0 for advanced HD sound and comes with a filter to eliminate foundation noise while recording. We tested in both 5. 1 and 7. 1 channel modes with no distortion and good separation of channels.
There are a great many features that the front and back in the box are not enough and a further flap is used that will elaborate further. It also adds to the "gift box" effect and could make a nice present this holiday season.
All these features about the board that's not cluttered is mATX! As well as all the SLI/CrossFire capabilities we can see that it's passively cooled with a giant heatsink in the lower part right. There is a there are twelve phase power design usually composed of eight phase CPU vitality, two phase VTT energy and two phase storage power. There are 7 SATA-2 kindoms and an E-SATA interface header. The four DDR3 video poker machines operate in dual direct mode and support memory up to 16GB DDR3-2133 through all the BIOS. The red button allows for recovery without clearing all the BIOS if settings will be too extreme during overclocking. The addition of an on/off switch helps testers or those not which has a traditional case. A legacy PCI slot is there for that old PCI RAID controller and so. you just cannot bear to do without. RAID 0 and 1 is supported relating to the SATA-2 ports and will be cost-effective until SSDs become mainstream.
PS/2 keyboard connectors are the only look to bygone times and 8-channel audio is certainly fully supported and configurable if your full audio drivers are usually installed. The USB port on its side is actually the ROG connector plus allows a notebook so that you can monitor and configure the particular PC remotely. In practice this worked well using Eee PC 901 while using supplied cable. Firewire and E-SATA (there's yet another E-SATA and Firewire connector on the other side of the board for cases that have those connectors on them) are generally included. The addition of a fabulous CMOS clear button about the back panel will i highly recommend you overclockers and save tension reaching in a jumper with a pair of long-nosed pliers while storing a torch between tooth enamel and aiming it by using tongue manipulation....
Included in the package are SATA cables with metal bars to generate them easy to remove nonetheless keeping them securely set against accidental removal - some distance from the first SATA cables which are usually still supplied with a number of motherboards today. The ROG cable is just a USB (male to male) lead. Padding on the backside shield forms a snug match the edge of the board and it is thickly constructed making it simple to fit and remove lacking bending. The SLI bridge skilled assistance to install and the most notable thing is the Q-Connector meant for case wires (HDD, power, rest switch etc. ) so that they can be fitted there and therefore the entire connector taken out as you will access. This is the kind of time saving have that leaves people thinking why no-one has thought of it before.
Test Put in place
Removed to save space - please relate to html version of posting for details
Overclocking
Socket 1156 processors, like their socket 1366 siblings are renowned for their overclocking capabilities so many of us started with high hopes for the i7-870 on this board aided by the extensive options available within the BIOS. The BIOS is too detailed for american to explore in the following review but we advise viewing this YouTube video here considering the fact that your appetite is whetted for more information you can download the manual from the ASUS Support Site.
Our first target was 3. 5GHz and this was achieved without any kind of noticeable increase in heat (the Corsair H50 sealed processor watercooler is truly remarkable and completely silent). All benchmarks were run with no problems.
Incredibly, the program posted and booted into Windows at 4GHz concerning stock voltage. Running the Far Weep 2 benchmark caused some lockup though and we tend to increased the processor voltage to 1. 35V before the PROCESSOR completed all tests with very little problems. Even so, 1. 35V is still on the low side as opposed to some extremes we have seen with simple cooling.
We conducted our assessments at stock speeds though to allow readers to make comparisons on the fixed baseline.
Test Consequences
We should explain why there is selected certain tests plus why we repeated these folks for 1, 2, 3 and 4 cores. People buy motherboards for the purpose of different uses and whether you are a gamer who could make do with 2 cores or a video editor who could max out 4 cores determines which processor you will pair the board by means of.
We always advise not skimping on motherboard selection and purchasing a high end, fully featured one such as the Maximus III Gene (high final by socket 1156 standards - half the price of a socket 1366 board) increases the greatest flexibility as we will have. The benchmarks will show which processor is best suited for particular uses. We are comparing the ASUS Maximus III Gene along with the ASUS M4A79T Deluxe.
The advantage of DDR3-2000 versus DDR3-1600 and therefore the Dual channel memory could be clearly seen. Synthetic benchmarks eliminate various other bottlenecks and show the true potential of increasing cores. Only users of the AMD platform will be able to replace their current CPU having a 6-core "Bulldozer" one upcoming year. There are no packages for 6-core "Gulftown" (aka i9) processors willing to fit in a outlet 1156 motherbaord.
Similar state of affairs with very linear scaling.
The number of cores is free of effect on memory bandwidth (fortunately there are no single core Athlons on the AM3 configuration).
The results listed here quite interesting and your leveling off after 2 cores for those i7-870 but more linear to the slower AMD X4 CENTRAL PROCESSING UNIT. The results are over average for boards of those chipsets.
Far Cry 2 is widely acknowledged as being the game to bring whatever system to its hips and we deliberately tested in the highest settings for each resolution is actually 8x anti aliasing. Frame rates are perfectly playable at all resolutions (we don't possess a 30" monitor for any ultra high resolutions).
Contrasting the FPS associated with Far Cry 2 is definitely Tom Clancy's HAWX which is a cross between flight simulator along with air combat game and also we achieved over 60 fps at all resolutions.
Horror games are currently popular and Resident Evil 5 boasts a great benchmarking function built-in. The board performed very well in this test.
Conclusion
We've deliberately avoided finding bogged down with dozens of benchmarks comparing many motherboards as this is exactly one component where the particular performance varies by usually underneath 1% across the wide variety. Readers looking to see all these benchmarks are pointed in the direction of AnandTech and similar web pages. We have already explored thorough and rest assured that this Maximus III Gene is in the top 3 in just about any test in available standards. Instead we are taking care of the added features not to mention bundled software that add more unique value to each and every motherboard.
ROG motherboards have never disappointed in terms of features and the Maximus III Gene is very little exception despite its mATX create factor which puts some pressure on available "real-estate". The choice for this seems to be to allow the board to become used for small form factor and easy on the back systems for gamers to employ in LAN parties plus gaming conventions etc.
Overclocking used to be the realm of typically the connoisseur requiring great skill/experience together with tenacity with nerves of iron required and therefore the constant danger of apparatus destruction adding tension in the hours it took to get yourself a stable overclock. No longer is this the result now that ASUS have wine basket easy for everyone (and no more can we impress adult females at parties by producing ourselves as PC overclockers.... ) with PC stepup, iROG connect, MemPerfect and a coordinate of utilities within Windows so that it is easy to get professional translates to a fraction of the time and with little or simply no risk.
When everything is taken into account we are convinced that the ASUS Maximus III Gene is the greatest socket 1156 motherboard now available and is keenly priced as for the target market.