The Board - Layout

Like all recent ASUS ROG boards before it, the ASUS Maximus V Extreme is clad in black and red, with red slots and red highlights everywhere. Covered in huge spiky and black heatsinks, it definitely looks extreme, and it does pack a fair bit of heft with so much inside. The rear of the board is a shiny black mess of pins and tiny parts. Take care not to knock any of these parts off when installing the board!


The socket of the ASUS Maximus V Extreme is all business. Three sides are surrounded by heatsinks, and the Dimms are on the fourth side. The reverse side sports a much more sedated look with plenty of clearance for aftermarket heatsink backplates.


There are six provided expansion slots: five PCIe x16 slots and a single PCIe x4 slot. How the slots are wired and which one is active when can be fairly complicated, but ASUS included a little card inside the driver CD sleeve explaining it all. You can take a look at the card in the middle picture above. The four alternating red and black DIMM slots support DIMMs in excess of 2800 MHz if your CPU is capable, and each stick can be up to 8 GB in size, which brings the total supported system memory up to 32 GB.


The ASUS Maximus V Extreme's bottom edge takes a slightly different approach than other ASUS ROG products, with simple audio plugs and a SATA port on the left side and a ROG Connect header in the middle for those 5.25 bay ASUS OC Station devices. The right side carries the USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 headers, front panel jacks, and a couple of fan headers. Speaking of fan headers, there are eight total fan headers on the ASUS Maximus V Extreme. All of them are 4-pin PWM based and have quite a few adjustment options in the BIOS.


The rear I/O bracket starts with a ThunderBolt port. The ROG Connect and CMOS Clear buttons follow closely and there is a bit of space for the Wi-Fi GO! card header and its antennae ports. There are four USB 2.0 ports, four USB 3.0 ports, a bunch of audio ports, and a single LAN port. Those that are concerned with n-Key rollover rates will be happy to see a combined keyboard/mouse PS/2 port. There are eight internal SATA ports on the board's right edge, two of which are SATA 3 Gb/s, while the remaining six, all of which are red, are SATA 6 Gb/s. Four of those ports are provided by add-on controllers and two come from the Intel Z77 Express PCH. The two remaining SATA 3 Gb/s ports of the Intel Z77 Express PCH are taken up by the SATA port on the bottom edge. It is meant to be used with the add-on bracket, and the last one is for the mSATA port provided by the add-on Wi-Fi GO! card.