Asus Maximus IV Gene-Z Z68 Motherboard Review

Keeping in with traditional Asus ROG boards, we find a board plastered with red and black colour detail across the memory and expansion slots, as well as SATA ports and heatsinks. We find the Gene-Z is a Micro ATX board but still looks to pack a punch from what’s on offer. There are passive heatsinks around the CPU socket, and a low-profile heatsink cooling the Z68 chipset from Intel.

The CPU socket is surrounded with capacitors, chokes and other vital components to give the best possible power to the CPU. To cool the VRM area and MOSFETS, we find two black heatsinks that are joined via a heatpipe. Though there is a lot going on, there is still ample space for larger CPU coolers.

Taking a look at the memory slots on the board, we find space for four modules accepting up to 32GB of DDR3 1333/1600/1866 (OC)/2133 (OC)/2200 (OC) and also supports Intel XMP memory modules.

When we focus on the expansion slots of the board we find two PCI-Express x16 slots, which run at x16 speeds or x8 speeds if using both slots in a dual GPU configuration. We also find a single PCI-Express x4 slot for various other types of PCI-Express based cards.

Moving further down towards the Front panel headers, we find audio headers, a start button, reset button and debug LED as well as USB headers and the general front panel switches and LED headers.

Taking a look at the SATA ports we find six ports stacked in twos, the four black/grey ports support SATA 3Gb/s while the two red ports support SATA 6Gb/s and all ports support RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10 and have support for Intel ISRT.

Now turning to the rear panel we find a PS2 combo port, 8 USB 2.0 ports of which one is a ROG connector white port, two USB 3.0 ports, a CMOS reset button, Gigabit LAN port powered through Intel, optical SPDIF, HDMI output and six audio jacks.