ASUS Maximus IV Gene-Z Review
Up Close cont
One major area the Gene-Z hasn’t changed when compared to the earlier models is in the use of the PCI-e release latches and single-latch DIMM sockets. These are both far and away the most user-friendly solutions on the market and, having lost more than enough knuckle skin attempt to flick some tiny lever to release the GPU on other boards, we applaud it. The PCI-e slots themselves are x16 in single-card mode and x8 in Crossfire/SLI setups.
Your eyes don’t decieve you, the audio ports really are that close to the top PCI-e slot. There is about 4mm clearance between the back of our stock GTX570 and our CPU cooler. This definitely is a tight squeeze.
Below the ATX24 pin power are the ProbeIt monitoring points and the ‘Go’ button that loads a specific BIOS setting of your choosing.
The Gene-Z comes with the ASUS Extreme Engine Digi+ Power phase, meaning 8 phases for the CPU, 4 for the iGPU and 2 for the memory. Storage is handled by four SATA-II ports and two SATA-III ones. Similarly to USB 2.0 there comes a point at which, because of the backwards compatibility of both, we wonder why manufacturers don’t replace the whole arrangement with the improved respective version 3s.
Because of the compact nature the start and reset buttons are found below the PCI-e x1 slot.
The IO ports are the back are plentiful to say the least. 8 USB 2.0 ports, 2 USB 3.0, 2 eSATA and the audio ports are found alongside an external CMOS clear, GigaLAN and the HDMI for the integrated graphics.
