Asus Maximus IX Extreme motherboard

One pool party we’d rather not attend

PRICE $ 929 www.asus.com.au No,

that price above is not a typo. This is indeed a motherboard that may as well be priced at a grand for all intents and purposes. Now, this might be hard to stomach for most PC PowerPlay readers, but it’s not aimed at most of us – this is a product targeted at those with so much money that they don’t mind blowing ten grand on a custom-built PC. So, what do you get for a board that costs around 2.5 times the price of a standard Z270 motherboard?

The key feature here is the integration of water cooling, with the inclusion of a huge monoblock to cover the CPU and surrounding VRMs. This ain’t no cheap All-in-One type of water cooler – we’re talking a dedicated water block that will need to be plugged into a separate radiator and pump; the example Asus sent us was from Bitspower. To buy a similar water block would cost around $200 or so, which does go some way to offsetting that extreme price point. There’s also a monoblock for watercooling your M.2 SSD, a handy feature seeing that these guys can throttle under sustained load.

As for the board itself, to be frank it’s not that remarkable. It’s of the ATX form factor; for a grand we really expected E-ATX. There are three full length PCIe x16 lanes, along with a single x1 lane. As it’s a Z270 board, it can support SLI. Four memory slots support speeds of up to 4133MHz, which has to be a new record, provided you’re willing to spend the $600 or so necessary on a memory kit capable of these speeds. Eight SATA 3 6Gbps slots are included, along with dual M.2 slots for high speed SSDs. There don’t seem to be any extra PCIe lanes over the standard Z270 chipset, another missed opportunity at this price point.

A single USB 3.1 pass-through is delivered for front port access, along with twin USB 3.0 ports, while rear high speed port access is twin USB 3.1 /Thunderbolt 3 – one each of Type A and C. As for rear USB 3.0, there are six included. Obviously there’s room for more USB ports if you decide to utilise

we’re talking a dedicated water block that will need to be plugged into a separate radiator and pump

the onboard USB headers. Integrated 802.11ac support is included alongside the Intel Ethernet. Finally, we have the audio solution, which uses Asus’ unique take on Realtek’s latest codec, which is called the S1220 HD codec.

To be frank, we’re really struggling to justify that price point. What we have here is a relatively standard premium board that should cost around $450, along with a $200 waterblock. To bundle the two together and charge nearly a grand seems like Asus is taking the, erm, water out of its customer base. BENNETT RING

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