ASUS Maximus III Extreme LGA 1156 Motherboard Review

[Apoptosis]

ASUS Maximus III Extreme LGA 1156 Motherboard Review

ASUS recently added a new P55 motherboard in the Republic of Gamers motherboard series called the Maximus III Extreme! The Intel LGA 1156 motherboard supports Core i3/i5/i7 and is aimed at enthusiasts. The board supports 16GB of DDR3 memory, five PCIe x16 slots, SATA 6Gbps, SuperSpeed USB 3.0 and even Bluetooth support! Read on to see how this loaded up motherboard performs when pushed to its limits with subzero cascade cooling!

I would suspect the Maximus III Extreme to sit somewhere between $300 and $350, tending closer to $350. Just a quick search of Newegg yields only 3 likely candidates for competition: the MSI P55 Big Bang series and the EVGA P55 Classified 200. In a feature shoot-out the Maximus III Extreme has them beat with USB 3.0, SATA 6 Gbps, 4-way CrossFire PCIe slots, and ROG Connect right out of the box. In the land of overbuilt LGA1156 boards it would appear the Maximus III Extreme will reign supreme.

Article Title: ASUS Maximus III Extreme LGA 1156 Motherboard Review
Article URL: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1257/1/

[Lt Ohio]

The only thing that would make this board better is if they had a 1156 six core cpu, this board is awesomely sick though.

[skier]

good read Gomeler

what are your thoughts on the CMOS battery being under the first PCIe slot? is the CMOS jumper there as well?(My Gigabyte board is that way) or is it just entirely irrelevant because you never need to fool with it given the auto-recover?

My board also has an auto recover on failed boot, but i've still had to use the CMOS jumper once or twice(going from 1800MHz 2v RAM settings, to a diff 1600MHz 1.5v kit (didnt like the .5 overvolt at all))

[Gomeler]

I had to reset the CMOS once and that was when I forgot to change the BIOS from my cascade settings(25x220, 1.65vcpu) and tried to boot on air. The board would keep trying to POST and get stuck on Check CPU. Otherwise in the last 3-4 weeks I've been playing with the board I have never had to reset the BIOS. The board has a CMOS reset switch on the I/O panel which makes life really easy.

I hope they release 32nm quad-core and hex-core CPUs to LGA1156. I really enjoy the platform as even though the board is quite expensive it is overall a cheaper platform for me compared to LGA1366. I doubt they'll do that anytime soon though, it would eat LGA1366 CPU and chipset sales.

[nick30076]

Is the PCIe x4 available when two video cards (5970's) are installed for x16/x16 operation?

[mikelehmann]

would be nice if you would show some realistic overclocking. 99.9% wont be using extream cooling.

[skier]

would be nice if you would show some realistic overclocking. 99.9% wont be using extream cooling.

people that spend over $300 for a board generally do...

cheap boards=cheap systems=cheap cooling
top tier boards=top tier systems=top tier cooling

[Kaos Kid]

Skier is right. We want to know the upper limits of what a chip is capable of if we did have the bucks to spring for the extreme cooling (to determine whether it is worth getting it ourselves). Anyone can report their results on air...