 Maximus 4Gene Z. So this is a version of a micro ATX motherboard for the LGA 1155 platform that includes support for SLI, ATI Crossfire, ATI Crossfire. I think what they surely mean is AMD Crossfire X. It uses the Intel Z68 chipset. So yes, this is a version of an MATX Republic of Gamers motherboard that uses a Z-type chipset rather than the P67 chipset, which means you have support for Intel SRT technology, which stands for makes your hard drive go faster using an SSD. And then we've also got support for Virtue, which is using the Lucid Hydrologic software in order to use the integrated GPU for things like transcoding video and saving power and using your dedicated GPU or GPUs in the example here for running games and like other baller stuff like that. Okay, so SupremeFX X-Fi 2 is built in so you got decent onboard sound. Game first, which is something to do with prioritizing your network traffic. ROG Connect, which is kind of neat so you can use a USB cable to plug in and overclock your board using another computer. This is cool. BIOS print. One click, easily share your BIOS settings so you can print out your BIOS settings. Very neat because this is very helpful for helping other people with their stuff. GPU DIMM POST is... okay, this is kind of poorly named actually because what they really mean is like GPU and memory POST diagnostics and I think they're trying to shorten it a little too much because it's a cool tool, but they've made it kind of hard to communicate exactly what it does. So from within the BIOS you can actually easily diagnose which cards are plugged into which DIMMs if they're detected properly or DIMMs slots for the PCIe slots, whether they're being detected properly and that'll allow you to more easily diagnose any issues that you're having with the system. So let's have a look at what we've got included here is our ROG Connect cable. We've got some cable ties. We've got a short SLI bridge. That's a flexible bridge. I prefer to see a black one or a red one on a board like this, but that's okay. We've got front panel connectors. We've got an ad for Zonar sound cards which I definitely believe are awesome. I'm a big fan of this guy right here, the Zense, although the Essence STX is very popular as well. Zense is what I'm using personally though. Alright, we've got six SATA cables, two of which are SATA 3 6 gigabit per second right angle cables and four of which are SATA 2 3 gigabit per second right angle cables, although any of them will probably work for any of them. Okay, we've got our I.O. Shield, our user guide including a DVD which you should throw away and download the latest drivers from the Asus website, Republic of Gamers sticker which you cannot download from the Asus website. You'll have to use that one. Hard drive labels so you can go ahead and label your cables. Label your cables on the tables before playing all three fables, but not on a PC because Microsoft doesn't support the PC the way they support Xbox which is not really related to this motherboard. Here's an ROG sticker. There we go. Alright, let's go ahead put these things back in here. Put the other thing back in the other thing. Put this thing in the thing, that thing in the thing. Alright. This is the Maximus 4 Gene Z. You know ever since the original, like okay, do you guys remember how hard it was to find a performance micro ATX motherboard even a few years ago? Like I remember back in the Enforce 4 days, EVGA was the only one, the only one who went and released an Enforce 4 SLI motherboard in the micro ATX form factor and even that it wasn't a great board. I mean it had all kinds of bugs. I had one at one point. It was not a great board. It had like a goofy color scheme. It was just terrible and then all of a sudden DFI started this trend. They released a performance micro ATX board and all of a sudden Gigabyte and Asus and MSI, they're like all on this bandwagon of performance boards. Now I think it's great because the reality of it is this is all your power and your CPU socket in your memory and that's all the same size as an ATX board. Here you've got enough room for dual GPU. So whether it's SLI or Crossfire, you can put in two dual slot GPUs and since you've got decent onboard sound, decent onboard LAN, decent onboard everything else you could possibly need, I mean this, this is, this is now just a smaller version of everything that you could put on an ATX board. You've got all of that performance even things like voltage checkpoints and you save a little bit of power by using a smaller PCB for your chips and all that good stuff, powering fewer slots and yeah it's just smaller. I think small gaming boxes are cool. I built myself a gaming box in an SGO1 SUGO system. It was water-cooled. I took the top of the system and I turned the whole thing into a triple rad and then like put a little shroud around it and put some grills on it so people wouldn't like stick their fingers in. So yeah sorry battery run out. I'm back. Alright so let's have a look at the overall layout of the board. Here's our LGA1155 socket which supports all the latest Core i3, Core i5 and Core i7 CPUs including unlocked ones because this is a Z68 board. So all those overclocking features are enabled. We got some beefy looking heatsinks here. Check those out from an angle. They look kind of like, like 2d sprites of something, like a dragon. See? See check this out. There's this little eye and there's this little like mouth thing and there's his wings right there. Like that's his wing. That's kind of like his rump right there. See? You see the dragon? Cool I think it's a dragon. So our 8-pin power connectors up in the top left corner of the board we've got a couple of, look at that, two CPU fan connectors. See? Why does it take a Seuss to think of simple things like that? So many CPU coolers have dual fans. Why don't you have two CPU fan headers? Well, Seuss thinks you do need two CPU fan headers and I think they're right. Four DDR3 DIMM slots supporting up to probably 32 gigs of memory would be my guess in dual channel because that is what is supported by these CPUs. We've got all of our V checkpoints here including ground, DRAM, CPU SA, IOPCH, IGPU, CPU PLL, CPU and an additional ground. Our 24-pin power connectors and its ideal location along the right hand edge. We've got another 4-pin PWM fan connector, one USB 3.0 front panel connector. There's your BIOS chip if you care. We've also got two SATA 3 6 gigabit per second ports and four SATA, SATA 3 6 gigabit per second ports and four SATA 2 3 gigabit per second ports. Got a chipset heatsink here. It's not cooling much these days. There's not a whole lot that goes on in the chipset. We've got our front panel connectors so for your power reset all of that good stuff. Two USB 2.0 front panel ports, another 4-pin PWM fan connector. They really do squeeze a lot onto this tiny PCB. Post readout, start and reset switches that are both built on, front panel audio and then the two times PCIe 16x slots although this one is only wired for 8x so what you've got essentially here is 16x, 8x, 8x or 16x, 1x, 4x, 8x, 8x, 4x. That is what you are looking at. So here is yet another 4-pin PWM and let's go ahead and count them all. So one, two, three, four, five. Five 4-pin PWM fan connectors. Ah, ah, ah. So let's have a look on the back. We got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Yeah, eight USB 2.0 ports. We've got a PS2 keyboard mouse combo port. We've got the, that's the BIOS reflashing. Nope, that's clear CMOS. Look at that. Okay, clear CMOS. Two USB 3.0 ports, gigabit ethernet, optical audio out, HDMI out which you're gonna want to go ahead and use if you want to use the Intel, shoot, what's it called? Quick, smart, smart response. No, hold on. Smart response technology is the hard drive one. Quick sync. I think it's quick sync. The one where you use your integrated GPU in order to do video transcoding. We've also got 7.1 audio out and those look like gold-plated connectors. Very nice touch. So thank you for checking out my unboxing of the Maximus 4 Gene Z from Asus. Don't forget to subscribe to LinusTechTips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos.