Layout

At a first glance the ASUS Maximus V Extreme looks very good with its harmonic design. Once again the ROG-colors - red, black and white - suite nicely and together with the black PCB it becomes a beautiful product. The layout itself is well thought and there is for example plenty of space around the CPU socket to install even todays largest CPU coolers. The fact that there are SATA connector which have been angled by 90 degrees allow an easy installation of oversized graphics cards.

The ASUS Maximus V Extreme comes with a digital 8+4+2 phase power design. The CPU gets eight phases, the iGPU can rely on four phases and the memory gets a stable current supply from two individual pahses. Furthermore ASUS equips this board with their so called "Black Metallic Chokes". These can resist temperatures ranging from -70°C to +125°C. This makes the power desing even better for extreme overclocking where extremely low temperatures around the CPU socket can be reached.

Totally you'll find four DIMM-slots on the Maximus V Extreme. Officially supported are DDR3 2800 (OC), 2666 (OC), 2600(OC), 2400 (OC), 2200 (OC), 2133 (OC), 2000 (OC), 1866 (OC), 1600, 1333 and 1066 MHz. There is engough space between the DIMM-slots and the CPU socket which means that you wont encounter compatibility problems with big coolers even when you choose to install RAM with big heatspreaders. Also supported are Xtreme Memory Profiles (XMP) in version 1.3.

On the Maximus V Extreme the southbridge as well as the PLX chip, which can be found between CPU socket and the first PCI-Express x16 slot, are being cooled by passiv cooling blocks, which have been connected via a heatpipe. For the current converters we see a very similar picture. There are also two passive cooling elements connected via a heatpipe. In fact, the PLX chip is always an interesting feature. In this case ASUS chose to put a PLX PEX8747 PCI Express 3.0 bridge chip onto the board. This chip is able to multiply the 16 lanes, which come from the CPU, by two an therefore provied 32 lanes. As long as you don't use more than two graphics card 16 lanes are sufficient but once you run a setup with three or four graphics cards you will need at least 24 or 32 lanes.