 Buy a qualifying Intel product and get entered in the Intel Dynamic Ticket Giveaway for a chance to win great prizes. Visit IntelGamingPromo.com to learn more. This, you guys, is the board that people like me have been waiting for ever since EVGA released their N-Force 4 NATX SLI Ready Board. The whole concept of high-performance, fully-featured, small motherboards is extremely exciting to nerds like me who get excited about small, fully-featured motherboards. So this is about, look, I mean, look how full to the brim the accessory package is for the first MITX ROG motherboard. So here we go. Let's get into this because I'm pretty darn stoked. One of the big problems with many ITX systems is that you can only have one expansion slot, which means that if you're a storage enthusiast, you're fine, throw a RAID card in there. If you're a graphics enthusiast, you're fine, throw a graphics card in there. If you're an audio enthusiast, you're fine, throw a great sound card in there. But what if you happen to be enthusiastic about two of those things? Now you're boned because it's only got a single PCI Express 16x slot, even on high-end boards. ASUS has addressed that in a very, very meaningful way. So we'll start with the accessories here. So first up, oh yeah, high-end networking enthusiasts, don't worry, you'll be fine. Wireless AC, that is dual-band 2.4 5 GHz wireless AC, is built into this board on their MPCIe Combo 2 module. So this acts not only as a wireless AC card, but also as an NGFF or M2 expansion slot, so you can put upcoming SSDs in there as well. So these two go together just like previous generation Intel antennas. You can actually stick this to something that's made of metal, which I, go figure, don't have here. But anyway, you can stick it to the side of your case or whatever else, as long as it's not made of aluminum. All right, next up, we've got some SATA cables. So there's four SATA cables, two straight, all straight, no right angle SATA cables. This board, unlike the iDeluxe board, only has four SATA ports compared to six on the other one, because this is more of a gaming-centric board as opposed to a storage or media center-centric build. With that said, it has a cool media center feature I'll tell you about later. All right, no, I'm saving this one for later. We've got a couple of different screws for mounting various things to the board, such as the wireless module. Okay, we've got whatever the devil this is. Looks like it. Whoops. And I'm knocking the box around. Who knows what he's going to do next? Oh, this is way better. They should include this on all of their new boards instead of the Q connector, which I've always felt is a very kludgy solution because it dramatically increases the profile of the front panel connectors, as well as, like, just, you know, not feeling very sturdy and just being very wobbly. This right here is an expand or is an extender for it. So it plugs in as one unit, just like the Q connector, and then you can actually extend them somewhere where it's more convenient to plug them in. That's great. Asus, if you're watching and I know you are. This on every board. Get rid of Q connector. Love it. Great idea. All right. We've got an I.O. shield. And then finally, this, my friends, is where I start to geek out. This is the Supreme FX Impact. This is a sound card that is also intended to be used as well as a sound card and can be used without taking up your PCI Express slot. So remember, guys, you can get 5.1 output by reconfiguring jacks. So that's that's a thing. But you're going to be probably mostly using this as kind of your headphone out and microphone in. I mean, what is this board designed for? More like land use. And if you really wanted to run a whole bunch of speakers off of it, you're probably going to want to use an external DAC and the optical connector right here. But this, my friends, is what makes it possible to have a truly high end machine from every perspective that I can think of on an MITX board. So what they have achieved here is probably something similar to what Asus is telling me. This is second only to the Maximus 6 formula in terms of the Supreme FX implementation. So you have there I forget what they call it, but it's a sonic radar feature, which allows you to see visually where sounds are coming from. But that's much less important to me than the fact that you've got a 115 decibel signal to noise ratio. And you've got a lot of the technologies that we've come to expect from Zonar cards built into something that comes with your motherboard. And so this is probably equivalent to somewhere in the range of a 35 to 50 dollar dedicated audio solution. And it comes with your board. It also is able to drive up to 600 ohm headphones. So that is very, very high impedance headphones either off of the rear port or even off of the front port. So they have configured it so that you're not going to get necessarily a hugely deteriorated audio experience off your front panel port, like you see with many audio solutions that might otherwise be very high end. So extremely exciting. They've also got one other cool media centric feature that allows you to, if you have it configured correctly, have the board completely powered off as long as it just has standby power and you can actually plug something into the line in in the front of the case. So that would be a microphone jack is would probably be coated on on the front and then have that come out of the line out on the back of the motherboard. So you can actually run content through the speakers that are connected to it even when the board is not powered up. So that's that's kind of neat as long as they're amped speakers. So let's move on to the actual layout of the board itself. So right here, this is impact power. Compact dynamo of full scale power. These chokes can handle up to 60 amps of power. So it uses the same black wing chokes and 10 K black metallic solid state capacitors that are going to give you better temperature tolerance, cooler operation, much longer lifetime than generic capacitors. And all of this is on an M ITX board. The first time we saw this was with the P8Z77I Deluxe, which was the MITX board last generation. So this is an even higher end implementation. It looks better. Looks better. Here's the like huge solid metal connectors that lead from the general PCB to the thing. I hope you guys can see that those like massive think of it in terms of like, you know, thicker, thicker lines for transmitting power means less loss and more more stability for the current to flow. So there you go. They're taking it very seriously putting the VRM up here. All right, let's move along to the. Oh, man, that looks so good. Water cool this, but like a nice block there. Dead sexy. Anyway, two DDR3 dual channel slots so you can run up to 16 gigs with currently available DDR3 modules. The eight pin and 24 pin connectors are right next to each other. This I've never really seen before. And it really depends on the MITX case you use, whether these are optimal configurations for them. But you shouldn't have too much trouble. On board start as well as on board. Hopefully this is reset, but it's not actually labeled. So, guys, let me know if I'm wrong on that one. We've got an on board USB three front panel header as well as those four SATA ports I was talking about before. The MPCI combo to actually goes down here at the bottom of the board as opposed to on the larger desktop boards where we're used to seeing it up closer to the top. You've got four four pin fan connectors that are all configurable from within fan expert two. So there's one here and then three actually clustered up here in the top left corner, including their patent pending one that detects and automatically configures for three pin or four pin fan control for your CPU. We've also got an LGA 1150 socket. I guess that's important. So you can run the latest Haswell processors, including the 4770K. And then you can overclock the snot out of it because you're on a very, very sort of desktop grade like mini ITX board on the back in terms of I.O. We've got that optical audio port that I talked about before HDMI and display port out as well as their impact control. And what the impact control on the back here does is it adds more functionality. So you can see it's a little PCB riser that would normally be on the board itself, but there wasn't enough room. So we've got a post readout, which is cool because you can actually read it from outside the case as well as the memo K button and direct key bios flashback and R.O.G. Connect, which they no longer include the cable for, but the hardware implementation is still there. So as long as you have a USB A to A cable, you can get that going. No problem for USB 2.0 ports for USB 3.0 ports. E SATA is something we've started to see less of, but there it is. It's on this board and an Intel gigabit Nick supporting their game first packet prioritization technology through Asus's A.I. Suite 2. Now they also include their usual value add software with R.O.G. board. So that is Kaspersky antivirus, Demon Tools as well as their RAM disk software. So I think that pretty much covers it. Guys, would I recommend the Maximus six impact? The answer is yes. If you want the very best possible experience for gaming for an M.I.T.X build, this is pretty much the way to go. They have a new generation I Deluxe. If you want more SATA ports, then that one, I guess, looks pretty compelling. If you want their four way optimization, which is their E.P.U. as well as CPU clock speed, the VRM control, there's a bunch of stuff that it does to optimize your system for power as well as performance. That is not how R.O.G. boards overclock with their one button overclocking, whereas the other one is like it's like dynamic and it figures it out on its own. These use CPU level up. So if you really want that functionality, then go for it. Otherwise, I really would prefer personally to go with the R.O.G. board and do it manually because. Between this and the six formula, like I can't think of another board that I would necessarily buy. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews and other computer videos. Don't forget to like this video if you liked it, dislike it if you disliked it. Leave me a comment and let me know what you think about this board. And I know you're considering not leaving a comment, James, but you should probably do it.