 So today we're going to be having a quick look at the Maximus 3 gene. This is part of Asus' Republic of Gamers line of motherboards, so it includes cool features like ROG Connect, plug and overclocked, tweak it the hardcore way, whatever that means, Mem Perfect, which is optimizing your memory without lifting a finger. Actually, I've never heard of either of these, but what are you going to do? Mem OK, this one I know. This is the button that you press to make sure that you run any memory at bone stock settings at kind of a safe setting to make sure that you can post, and then after you post you can tweak the memory afterwards. OK, you've got Supreme FX X5 built in, so it includes all of those high end features, but what we haven't shown you is that this is a micro ATX motherboard. So this is part of their LGA 1156 line of motherboards, so it supports Core i7 and Core i5. It also supports Core i3, although I can't imagine buying a really expensive board like this and putting a Core i3 on it. It does support SLI and Crossfire, so if you're doing like a small extreme gaming rig, like in a SUGO or another small form factor case, this would be a perfect motherboard for it. It's Windows 7 ready, and we'll flip it around to the back where it says basically the same thing as it said on the inside. So why don't we get this box opened up and have a look. So the first thing we find inside is the motherboard. Bam, just like that. Like all of their Republic of Gamer boards, it has a very, very cool, catchy color scheme, but we're going to actually take it away from you, ha ha, and look at the accessories first. So we have a USB cable. OK, thank you for that. Just your standard A to A cable. There's got to be something in here it plugs into. There's no reason for that. SLI bridge, remember, if you need a Crossfire bridge, it should come with your video card. OK, then you've got some zip ties for cable management. You've got the user's guide as well as the... Oh, OK, this is interesting. So you've got a user's guide, you've got a drivers and installation DVD, as well as a Republic of Gamer sticker. Don't use this DVD. Download the latest off asus.com. All right, and then this is neat. So they've included little stickers for labeling your hard drives and color coded too. So that way you don't have to... When you've routed all of your cables through the case, you don't have to fuss around with which one connects to which drive. So you can make a little label like, oh, this is my 750 gig and this is my 500 gig and this is my SSD. Very cool. And then your user's guide is all English and very thick, so I'm not even going to try to go through that. All right. So you have a huge Republic of Gamer sticker that goes all the way over to the other side here and it's kind of come off a little bit. Hopefully we can get that off without damaging it too much. OK, there you go. So that's, I guess, for your case window. All right, very nice. Then you have your I.O. shield, which is their black premium looking I.O. shield with the kind of poofy shiny stuff on the back. Then we have six SATA cables, three of which are right angle and three of which are straight. And then we have our Q connector. OK, so I don't actually see what that USB cable is for, but I guess we'll get to that later. So here's the Maximus 2 gene. Like all P55 motherboards, and I hope I mentioned it's P55, you do have support for an LGA 1156 socket and you do have support for dual channel DDR3 memory and you should use the color coded slots. This board does have ASUS' unique feature where this side of the memory slot is not a clip, only the other side is an actual clip. So what you do is you slide the memory in this side with the clip open, push it down and clip it shut with just one side. In theory, it makes installing memory a little bit easier. Your power connectors are in their ideal locations at the top left corner of the board where you have an 8-pin power and then over on the right hand edge of the board where you have your 24-pin power. One thing that I really like that ASUS is doing with their Republic of Gamer boards is they're starting to include way more 4-pin fan connectors. So if you look at this board, we've got one, two, three, four, five 4-pin power connectors. So that means you can PWM control all the fans in your case without any additional hassle. We've got two PCI Express 16x slots that will run at 8x, 8x if you're running in crossfire, one PCI Express 4x and one PCI slot for expansion. You've got kind of a little cover here on the chipset that looks pretty neat. It's got like a mesh here so it gets a little bit of ventilation. And then you've got your onboard start and reset buttons. You've got the premium ones that look kind of like cool. Then you've got two, I was going to say two, but I guess it's three USB headers. And here is a plug for the OC station which I believe is available separately. It doesn't actually come with it. Here's your onboard Supreme X-Fi FX. And let me see if I'm missing anything here. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, over on this side. Okay, so you've got six SATA cables running off the chipset and one additional one here running off a third party chipset. Here is your go button. I think that's the memo K button actually. I hope it is anyway. All right, so let's go around to the back and we'll find out why we have like a random lone SATA port here and I'm going to assume it's because yes, there's eSATA on the back of the board. So that's where the other SATA port from that controller is. You've got a PS2 keyboard port. Then you've got one, two, three, four, eight USB 2.0 ports as well as another USB port here which I guess is what that cable was for. It must do something specific, something to do with this. I think it's their little overclocking thing. Okay, and then you've got a CMOS clear switch. I love this. This is great. It means you don't have to fish around in your case especially because it's a micro ATX board. That's going to be a real hassle. So you can just press this to clear the CMOS. Digital audio is provided by Optical only. Then you've got Firewire, eSATA, Gigabit Ethernet and 7.1 audio. Those look like gold plated connectors too. So thank you for checking out my unboxing of the Maximus 3 Gene.