Asus Maximus 3 Gene Motherboard Review.

Benefits
Buying a motherboard currently is quite a struggle since, in terms connected with performance, there is a small amount of to choose between the very best contenders. Brand loyalty is an individual route but leaves the sensation that something good may be missed out on through deficit of awareness of the a variety of offerings. Manufacturers have had a tricky time and the majority of have been forced to an "arms race" of adding a growing number of features to make their boards be noticed. A recent example will be the trend towards putting volumes of copper onboard with the help of little performance gain to indicate for it but for a disproportionate cost. Why did they take action? Simply because people choose motherboards determined by reading the specifications inside of a quantitative fashion. We believe far greater value for any customer can be acquired by putting features (software and hardware) in the package that gives these products tangible benefits.
ASUS certainly are a prime example of that. Their strategy is to help lead through innovation but not follow the herd. Readers will already be aware of products such as the Eee range and other home entertainment products they've developed. The ROG (Republic connected with Gamers) brand is rapidly gaining popularity with extreme gaming together with overclocking workshops and seminars being held in numerous countries. The selection of prizes given out at these events programs how closely ASUS understand the needs and aspirations of their audience. We've been impressed for a while now with the feature set of ASUS motherboards and think it's now the perfect time to review them with a focus on those features and not numerous benchmarks comparing 20+ boards that finally perform within 1% of each one other. Today the board involved is the Maximus III Gene, a flagship outlet 1156 product for Intel i5 and i7 (8XX series) processors.
Table Features
A brief summary in the main features follows: Removed to save lots of space - please talk about www. asus. com for more details
Board Layout
The box will come in a nice package which will prominently displays the ROG logo showing that your is an enthusiast as well as gamers motherboard.
It definitely is Windows 7 completely ready and everything was tracked down correctly during our 64-bit Windows 7 7 Pro setup. Installing the additional drivers and utilities that include the enclosed CD continues to highly recommended though.
The particular onboard X-Fi supports EAX 5. 0 for advanced HD sound and has a filter to eliminate historical past noise while recording. We all tested in both 5. 1 and also 7. 1 channel modes without distortion and good break up of channels.
There are countless features that the front and back of the box are not enough and an extra flap is used in order to elaborate further. It also adds to the "gift box" effect and can make a nice present this winter holiday.
All these features with a board that's not cluttered and is particularly mATX! As well as typically the SLI/CrossFire capabilities we can see that must be passively cooled with a giant heatsink in the floor right. There is a twelve phase power design composing of eight phase CPU capability, two phase VTT electricity and two phase storage power. There are 7 SATA-2 places and an E-SATA interface header. The four DDR3 slots operate in dual direct mode and support memory around 16GB DDR3-2133 through typically the BIOS. The red button permits recovery without clearing the BIOS if settings happen to be too extreme during overclocking. The addition of your on/off switch helps testers or those not by using a traditional case. A legacy PCI slot will there be for that old PCI RAID controller and so. you just cannot bear to spend. RAID 0 and 1 is supported for the SATA-2 ports and will be cost-effective until SSDs become mainstream.
PS/2 keyboard connectors will be the only look to way back when and 8-channel audio is actually fully supported and configurable when the full audio drivers tend to be installed. The USB port on its side is in fact the ROG connector and even allows a notebook so that you can monitor and configure that PC remotely. In practice this worked well with his Eee PC 901 making use of the supplied cable. Firewire and E-SATA (there's a different E-SATA and Firewire connector conversely of the board for cases who have those connectors on them) tend to be included. The addition of a good CMOS clear button for the back panel will make sure you overclockers and save tension reaching in a jumper with some of long-nosed pliers while sustaining a torch between pearly whites and aiming it together with tongue manipulation....
Included in the carton are SATA cables with metal bars for making them easy to remove nevertheless keeping them securely constantly in place against accidental removal - quite some distance from the first SATA cables which have been still supplied with a lot of motherboards today. The ROG cable is probably a USB (male to be able to male) lead. Padding on the lower back shield forms a snug match the edge of the board plus its thickly constructed making it straightforward fit and remove without bending. The SLI bridge commonly be installed to install and the most known thing is the Q-Connector designed for case wires (HDD, electricity, rest switch etc. ) for them to be fitted there and also entire connector taken out as you will access. This is the kind of time saving aspect that leaves people asking yourself why no-one has looked at it before.
Test Installation
Removed to save space - please mention html version of page for details
Overclocking
Outlet 1156 processors, like their socket 1366 siblings are renowned with regard to their overclocking capabilities so all of us started with high hopes for the i7-870 on this board aided by the extensive options available during the BIOS. The BIOS is too detailed for folks to explore in this particular review but we suggest viewing this YouTube video here considering the fact that your appetite is whetted for additional information you can download the manual from your ASUS Support Site.
All of our first target was 3. 5GHz this was achieved without all noticeable increase in climate (the Corsair H50 sealed processor watercooler is really remarkable and completely silent). All of benchmarks were run devoid of problems.
Incredibly, the technique posted and booted directly into Windows at 4GHz with stock voltage. Running the Far Be sad 2 benchmark caused some sort of lockup though and most people increased the processor voltage to at least one. 35V before the PC completed all tests without having problems. Even so, 1. 35V continues to on the low side as opposed to some extremes we have experienced with simple cooling.
We conducted our medical tests at stock speeds though to let readers to make comparisons with a fixed baseline.
Test Outcome
We should explain why you'll find selected certain tests and why we repeated all of them for 1, 2, 3 plus 4 cores. People buy motherboards intended for different uses and whether you will be a gamer who might make do with 2 cores or a video editor who should max out 4 cores determines which processor you may pair the board by using.
We always advise not necessarily skimping on motherboard selection and pc high end, fully featured one much like the Maximus III Gene (high conclude by socket 1156 standards - half the asking price of a socket 1366 board) increases the greatest flexibility as we will have. The benchmarks will show which processor is most effective for particular uses. We're also comparing the ASUS Maximus III Gene when using the ASUS M4A79T Deluxe.
The luxury of DDR3-2000 versus DDR3-1600 and also Dual channel memory might be clearly seen. Synthetic benchmarks eliminate different bottlenecks and show the potential of increasing cores. Only users of the AMD platform will replace their current CPU which has a 6-core "Bulldozer" one following year. There are no projects for 6-core "Gulftown" (aka i9) processors ?n a position to fit in a plug 1156 motherbaord.
Similar condition with very linear climbing.
The number of cores is free of effect on memory bandwidth (fortunately you can find no single core Athlons during the AM3 configuration).
The results here's quite interesting and a fabulous leveling off after 2 cores for those i7-870 but more linear with the slower AMD X4 CENTRAL PROCESSING UNIT. The results are higher than average for boards of such chipsets.
Far Cry 2 is widely acknowledged beeing the game to bring all system to its hips and we deliberately tested with the highest settings for each resolution along with 8x anti aliasing. Frame rates are perfectly playable in the least resolutions (we don't have a very 30" monitor for that ultra high resolutions).
Contrasting the FPS for Far Cry 2 is normally Tom Clancy's HAWX the cross between flight simulator as well as air combat game together with we achieved over 60 fps at all resolutions.
Horror games are popular and Resident Evil 5 provides a great benchmarking function internal. The board performed actually in this test.
Final result
We've deliberately avoided getting bogged down with a wide selection of benchmarks comparing many motherboards as it's one component where any performance varies by usually underneath 1% across the array. Readers looking to see these sorts of benchmarks are pointed near AnandTech and similar websites. We have already explored complete and rest assured which the Maximus III Gene is at the top 3 in just about any test in available criteria. Instead we are directed at the added features in addition to bundled software that combine unique value to every different motherboard.
ROG motherboards have never disappointed concerning features and the Maximus III Gene is very little exception despite its mATX mode factor which puts some pressure on available "real-estate". The choice for this is very much to allow the board to generally be used for small form factor and very mobile systems for gamers make use of in LAN parties and also gaming conventions etc.
Overclocking once were the realm of this connoisseur requiring great skill/experience and even tenacity with nerves of iron required and therefore the constant danger of hardware destruction adding tension above the hours it took to getting a stable overclock. No longer is this the fact now that ASUS have wine basket easy for everyone (and not anymore can we impress a lot of women at parties by releasing ourselves as PC overclockers.... ) by using PC stepup, iROG get in touch, MemPerfect and a variety of utilities within Windows turning it into easy to get professional ends up in a fraction of that time period and with little and also no risk.
When everything is thought about we are convinced the ASUS Maximus III Gene is the foremost socket 1156 motherboard you can buy and is keenly priced to its target market.