Interested in a first look at Asus’ latest Gene series offering for z68? PC Perspective has you covered with quite a few photos of the up and coming motherboard for you to drool over!
To start off with, here is the proposed box art along with a view of the entire motherboard:
As you can see, the motherboad is adorned in bright red and dark black colors, and the area around the LGA 1155 socket is accented with black finned heatsinks covering the VRMs. A close-up of the heatsinks can be seen below:
For even more detailed shots, and a run down of the connectivity and overclocking friendly hardware, please use the "Read More" link.
Also next to the CPU socket is the four dual channel DDR-3 DIMM slots:
This next two photos show the overclocking friendliness of this Asus motherboard. The power and reset buttons are available on the board itself, allowing customers to test the system before assembling it inside of a case. There are also various voltage contacts for testing the power supply’s delivery of current through the various aspects of the motherboard. Specifically, there are contacts labeled "GND, DRAM, CPU_SA/IO, PCH, IGPU, CPU_PLL, CPU, and GND" for measuring voltage to the memory, processor, southbridge, and graphics chip (The "I" in "IGPU" may indicate it measures the voltage of the Intel processor graphics). Lastly, there is a red "GO" button above the voltage contacts in the top right of the motherboard. This red button is likely the Asus MemOK memory failsafe button, which helps to mitigate motherboard and RAM compatibilities by falling back to lower speeds and looser timings if the SPD read off the RAM chip is not correctly identified by the motherboard. You will then be able to enter the BIOS and enter the correct default settings.
The voltage contacts and Asus "Go" button.
The Power, Reset, and two number readouts.
As for connectivity, the rear IO of the motherboard includes what appears to be:
- one PS/2 mouse/keyboard port
- eight USB 2.0 ports
- two USB 3.0 ports
- two eSATA ports
- one RJ-45 port (likely gigabit ethernet)
- one HDMI port
- one optical audio out
- 6 port analog out (5.1 or 2.1+mic in)
In addition, there is a CMOS Reset button that allows reverting to BIOS defaults without needing to open up the case.
Lastly, we have close up photos showing the presence of an internal USB 3.0 header, 6 SATA ports (likely 4 SATA II and 2 SATA III), an X-Fi chip, and a very interesting SSD shaped south bridge.
The USB 3.0 header and 4 of the 6 SATA ports
In the top left of the motherboard rests this X-Fi chip that reads "X-Fi 2 SupremeFX"
The mostly flat and rectangular southbridge cooler, though it would also be a good place for a larson creek mSATA SSD.
Unfortunately, these are all the details that we can provide you with, just enough to wet your apetite. As far as exacting specifications, Asus isn’t talking.
Are you excited for the new Maximus IV?
only two pci express ???
only two pci express ???
Aquire some PC-tech knowledge
Aquire some PC-tech knowledge before commenting the article. The Asus Gene -labeled mobos are of microATX form factor which means they have only 4 expansion slots at their disposal. No more than 2 dual slot (graphic)cards could be placed on any mATX board. Also the Z68 chipset doesn’t support three-way graphics of any kind natively, an expensive add-on chip is needed and found usually only on very high end boards, namely the X58 at the moment.
And most importantly, this board does have 3 pci express buses. One seems to be only 4x but it is an pci express nevertheless. And tell me, what for would you need the third pci express bus in this motherboard?
@Nebula: You can actually
@Nebula: You can actually have 5 exp slots, depending on case. Like this Lian Li V354: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811112300&cm_re=lian_li_v354-_-11-112-300-_-Product
This is what I’ve been
This is what I’ve been waiting for, it’s sandy time =) Currently using the III with a little i3-550, should be a huge jump. SLI and a ribbon for my sound card, can’t wait
When it will be available in
When it will be available in India and what will be the Price in Indian currency.