Layout

The Maximus IV Extreme come with the very typical ROG colors which are black and red. In this case the PCB has comes in black as well as northbridge, southbridge and capacitor cooling blocks. Red are the PCI-Express x16 slots, two DIMM slots as well as four SATA ports. It seems like everything that symbolizes speed has been kept in red. Everything together ends up in a very nice and homogenous design which you might already expect from a ROG-series motherboard.

ASUS provided their latest overclocking board with a digital power design, whereas the CPU gets eight phases and the memory gets three phases. Looking at the capacitors themselves you'll find ML caps around the CPU socket. These multilayer polymer capacitors offer advantages over ceramic capacitors. Therefore super ML caps remain stable under regular as well as AC voltage, doesn't have an aging mechanism and are resilient under thermal shock.

Totally you'll find four DIMM-slots on the ASUS Maximus IV Extreme. Officially supported are DDR3-2200(OC) / 2133 / 1866 / 1600 / 1333 / 1066 with up to 32 GByte capacity. Positioning of the DIMM-slots has been well thought which means they aren't too close to the CPU socket. Therefore there wont be too many incompatibilities between huge CPU coolers and big memory modules. What might also be a reason that there is more space than with other boards is the fact that the Maximus IV Extreme comes with an extended ATX form factor.

Northbridge as well as the current converters are being held at adequate temperatures via a passive heatpipe cooling solution. The southbridge got a passive cooling block which has not been integrated into the heatpipe loop of northbridge and VRM. The fact that the cooling blocks around the CPU socket aren't too big makes it comfortable to install a big aircooler. We also noticed the very high manufacturing quality of the cooling blocks and their weight which is quite immense.