Personal Opinion

In our reviews we try to focus on facts, based on which a customer can come to a conclusion himself whether he thinks a certain product is suitable for him or not. Our experience is, that with reviews like this we run into the situation of not seeing discussions at all. It is quite understandable because there is not much to talk about except facts, but that's kind of boring. So what to do about this? We decided to add a page dedicated to the editors personal opinion about the product. For example: sometimes it is the case that based on the facts the product is good, but there are some rather difficult to explain things which make a product "strange" or on the other hand "exciting". So be prepared for some more words on this page and as I'm not a native English speaker, some really weird phrases
These days ASUS offers some of the very best boards across all market segments. It is almost unbelievable how this company dominates the motherboard market at the moment. With the Maximus V Extreme they almost celebrate their domination. More features, more performance, ... I could start make another list of facts here, but that's not what I want to write about here. Instead I mention only one thing. One could think that the "outta space and not on this planet overclockers" who design these products only think about the fun factor for people with purses fatter than any huge sandwhich but no. For example the 3.3 Volt Generator is actually a very neat idea for people who own a power supply that struggles to power let's say a 2 way SLI/CF system. In such a situation it is well possible that the 3.3 Volt rail of this guys power supply doesn't have enough grunt to keep the system alive under load conditions. What ASUS does here is, they take the voltage from the much stronger 12 Volt rail and modulate it onboard to get a stable 3.3 Volt supply only for the PCI Express slots. Neat, isn't it?

And holy cow ... thank god there is a company that doesn't catch up with every marketing hype like weapon coolers or offending marketing campaigns. It seems like they have better ideas about what to do with their research and development money then that. For example they hire two of this planets most reknown - I don't know if legendary would be more appropriate here - overclockers called Andre Yang and Shamino. It is thanks to guys like them that todays BIOS'es an boards offer so many settings and features. Sometimes, when I see presets for every single DRAM chip, I really start asking myself whether Asia is on another planet than Europe. I mean testing and optimizing all those timings really takes a lot of time. And then there are settings in the BIOS like "Xtreme Tweaking" and "SPI Booster", which I'd call an adequate kick in the butt for 3DMark 01 and SuperPi.

I don't know if it's because this is the first time I'm doing this kind of writing about a product but it feels like I could keep going on for ages. But let's finish it here with kind of a closing remark. From the unboxing to the standard benchmarks to the overclocking the Maximus V Extreme (MVE) has been able to convince me. It isn't a board that just does the job when you take it out of the box it excels almost everywhere. In the end there are only two questions left: what does this thing cost and when can I buy it?