 This video is brought to you by Cooler Master, featuring the Sidon 240mm all-in-one CPU water cooling system. Check it out at www.coolermaster-usa.com Welcome to my unboxing and first look at the cream of the cream of Z78 boards. This is the Maximus 6 Extreme from Asus. It includes everything except the kitchen sink, but it's okay because you can probably get rid of your kitchen sink and swap it out with one of these guys. This is the OC panel and it's got a lot of cool functionality that we're going to get into throughout this video. The motherboard comes with full versions of Kaspersky and Demon Tools, which I think is a really cool value add for enthusiasts to buy it. On the outside of the box, Asus does a really good job of spelling out exactly what makes the board special. So there's the OC panel, the MPCI-E combo 2, as well as the Extreme Engine DigiPlus 3 technologies covered on the inside of the front of the box, which we'll cover in much more detail once we get the board out. And then on the back, they've got pretty much the same stuff. They talk about 4-way SLI and Crossfire, as well as some of the connectivity on the board. So let's go ahead and get this bad boy opened up. Now, the Extreme board is positioned more for overclockers than specifically for gamers. So you're going to find some of the features and some of the places where Asus has spent a lot of time and a lot of money developing this board are more beneficial to those guys who are looking to push for every last megahertz of frequency on their CPU, and not so much towards guys who are just going to kind of dial it into a safe setting and leave it there. Which isn't to say that it won't have safe profiles, it's just you don't get things like a more advanced, separated part of the PCB for your audio solution, like you do on a formula-grade board with the Extreme. So let's go ahead and open up the box of accessories, of which there are many. We'll start with the Q-connector, which allows you to more easily plug in your front panel connectors. A padded, labeled I.O. shield in the traditional Asus fashion. We have the custom sleeved cable for the OC panel, which plugs directly into the board and then into the bottom of the OC panel unit. A user's guide, which you should pretty much look at online if you need it. These are cool. Labels for your SATA cables, so you can tell which one is which at both ends. As well as their... Oop, there we go. For ROG Connect, they've got a USB A to A cable, so if you don't want to use the OC panel, then you can actually plug into a separate computer like a laptop and control settings from there. Three-way SLI bridge, four-way SLI bridge, two-way SLI bridge, all black, all matte, all gorgeous, and finally, a crossfire bridge that is in the same style. Now this is really nice, check this out. Republic of Gamers, decal for your case that unlike most case decals, actually has some heft to it and feels solid, and attaches with a magnet so that it doesn't... it's not a one-time use thing. We have the MPCIe combo port. MPCIe combo 2, rather, excuse me, module that sits on the MPCIe port at the top of the board. More on that in a moment. It has both a Wi-Fi dual-band AC as well as Bluetooth 4.0 built-in, eight SATA 3 6 gigabit per second cables, which crazily... oh no, 10, there you go, you got enough for every single port on the board, and finally, an external magnetic antenna for the built-in AC wireless. Last but not least, we have a 5.25 inch bay adapter for the OC panel itself, so you can put the LCD in the front of your case if you don't want to have a little separate thing sitting next to you, or you're not operating on an open test bench. Which leads us to our second black box. The first thing we see inside of which is the OC panel. Now, the OC panel can work in a number of different ways, and I'll start with one of the most basic things in that is the fact that this LCD can tilt up so that it can be mounted in that 5.25 inch adapter that I showed you before, giving you access to things like your level up button, which turns your overclock on and off with a hardware switch here, power button, fan control, and all kinds of other cool functionality that can be enabled with this device. We'll get into more depth with it once we've had a chance to be hands-on and really play with it when we're doing our Haswell overclocking guide, so stay tuned for that, guys. It's going to be awesome. The other way to use it is sitting on your desk, popped out like this, where it looks a lot like how many guys would have a multimeter or something like a temperature sensor sitting next to them while they're overclocking. Speaking of temperature sensors, this is very cool. It actually uses their SubZeroSense technology, is what they're calling it, to detect temperatures that are as low as liquid nitrogen. So this is suitable not only for making changes to your clock speeds or whatever else, but also for actually monitoring those, so it's a serious tool meant for people who are actually at the top of the field in terms of overclocking. And Extreme Mode has other cool stuff about it, like VGA hotwire, which allows you to actually directly overvolt supported ASUS graphics cards with this unit as well. And I mean, there's all this cool stuff here, too. Check this out. So inside here, you've also got a SATA power in, in addition to the data, which allows you to hook up some 4-pin PWM fans that you can run off the OC panel itself, as well as control things like Slow Mode. What Slow Mode does is sometimes liquid nitrogen overclockers don't want the PC to boot up as fast as possible, so Slow Mode is there for that pretty much more than anything else, as well as some other really cool things in here, including, there you go, direct voltage checkpoints that are again built into the board, but also built into the OC panel itself. Not everybody needs that functionality, though. I got briefed on this thing by Andre Yang himself, and so what he did is he helped design it. If you guys know overclocking, I hope you've heard of Andre Yang. And he also spent a lot of time with it once it was done, creating profiles that less advanced users can just implement. So all you really have to do is go, okay, well, I want to be able to, you know, monitor my fans and monitor my temperatures and make small tuning adjustments by pressing the buttons on it, and that's all fine and good and cool. But at the end of the day, you know, maybe what I end up doing is plugging in one of Andre Yang's profiles and going at it from there. So it has a more basic mode available to you as well. Which leads us to the board itself. Now, the first thing I noticed about it might seem weird to you, but that's that it's in a standard ATX form factor this time around. No extra width, which we do normally see on the extreme level boards. Next up, and I mean, this is okay, overclockers are always looking at what has ASUS done in terms of power delivery to make it so you can eek every last bit out of the CPU. So we see something we've seen for a couple generations now, and that's dual CPU power connectors, in this case an 8-pin and a 4-pin. And we also see a completely redesigned voltage delivery system. We've got their super premium 10K black metallic solid state capacitors that ASUS figures are good for up to five times the lifetime of what you'd see from a typical cap, and are capable of operating at up to 20% higher temperature tolerances. But that's not the only thing that's optimized temperature wise here. The NexFET MOSFETs operate at 90% efficiency, meaning very little power is lost to heat, and their black wing chokes, due to the design of the wing on them, are able to operate up to three to five degrees cooler. So the idea is that while it's completely overbuilt in terms of how much power it can deliver to the CPU, it is not sacrificing any of the efficiency and cool operation that you would want from the power delivery system. Now the CPU socket itself is an LGA 1150 socket, supporting the latest fourth generation Intel Core series processors, code named Haswell. And over here you're going to find four DDR3 dual channel memory slots. Now something notable about Haswell is that much higher frequencies of DDR3 are supported. However, once you start to overclock the CPU, you know the DDR3 2800 megahertz to 3 gigahertz speeds that you'll typically get on a good Haswell chip are going to start to go down to the point where once you're overclocking the CPU to the max, your RAM overclocking options are going to be somewhat more limited. Up in the top right we've got a post LED next to this is pretty cool. So Asus has built a custom three pin slash four pin slash whatever the heck this thing is CPU fan header. So what it does is it actually has a separate little sensor in there that tells the motherboard whether you're using a three pin or a four pin fan, and then will adjust the way that it controls your CPU fan profile accordingly without any intervention from the user. Very, very cool. Also up here at the top right we've got one of those slow mode buttons that's built directly into the board if you're not using the OC panel. Start and reset switches built in on board more voltage checkpoints for pretty much everything you could imagine. So you can use your high end multimeter to check all that stuff. I love this feature guys. DIP switches for turning on and off individual PCI express slots on the board, especially once you've got a bunch of water cooled GPUs in there. Diagnosing a problem with a graphics card can be an absolute nightmare. So being able to turn them off one at a time to figure out which one's causing the issue without taking the cards physically out is awesome. The memo K button helps you diagnose non-post situations where memory with aggressive profiles might not post correctly. And our 24 pin connectors in its ideal location along the right hand edge of the board along with a USB 3 connector in its ideal location along the right hand edge of the board. We've got two more. There they are. Black wing chokes. So those are the two that are providing power to the memory. Remember guys with memory frequencies going way the heck up, it's going to be helpful to be able to deliver as clean power to it as you possibly can. Over here we have six SATA 3 6 gigabit per second ports powered by the Intel chipset and four powered by an Asmedia chipset giving you a total of 10. And it should be noted that if you use the MPCIe combo NGFF slot or M.2 slot up in the top left that one of these ports will be disabled. Now I want to talk about that for a moment now. So they include a module here. So this is mini PCIe and USB 2 connectivity that's in here. So they include a module. There you go. That gives you Bluetooth 4.0 as well as wireless 802.11ac. However, it should be noted that it does support the M.2 standard. So you would be able to plug an SSD in there as well instead of having it plugged into a SATA port. Down here at the very bottom of the board, we've got a bio switch as well as our front panel connectors, two USB 2.0 connectors, the ROG external connector for the OC panel, a Thunderbolt header, meaning you can use an add-in Thunderbolt card to add Thunderbolt connectivity to this board, a direct key button, the fast boot button, as well as your audio header. Now I mentioned before it doesn't have a similarly high grade audio solution like what you might find on a formula board. But I think the assumption from ASUS is if you are spending this much money on a motherboard and the associated hardware that goes with it, you're probably buying something like a Phoebus to put in it anyway. All right. Now this is one of the things that really gets me geeking out about this board. We've got four PCI Express 16x slots. Okay, fine. There's another one here that's wired for 8x. And then we've got a PCI Express 4x slot. But what's unique about these is the flexibility that they afford. Normally on a non-X79 or non-premium tier platform from Intel, you've either got 16x or 8x, 8x or 4x, I don't think they even support 4x, 4x, or you'll have some kind of splitter, lane splitting chip that will allow you to achieve higher bandwidth but at a latency penalty that usually doesn't really result in better performance. What ASUS has done here is they've given you the option, okay, to either run 16x, 8x, 8x in two slots without using any splitters or intermediary bridge chips. So you can get that low latency if you don't need the extra bandwidth or 8x, 8x, 16x, 8x using a PLX chip so that you can achieve four-way SLI on the board and you'll have to take that latency hit for running so many graphics cards. But at least this way people who are running one or two don't have to deal with that. Love that. And if you're running a ton of graphics card, I would recommend using the easy plug right here. That does provide some additional power to the board so that you don't risk burning out your 24 pin, which is otherwise relied on for all the power to those components other than the plugins that go in the back of the video card. Now while the hardware for audio might not be anything special compared to the formula grade board, the software is still right up there so they've got their new Supreme FX3 software which includes what they're calling sound radar which gives you a visual overlay of where sounds are coming from in game without actually even relying on your ears at all which would be, I mean, the implications are very cool particularly for people who don't hear well or have hearing loss in one ear being able to take advantage of positional audio like that. This BIOS switch is a hardware switch that allows you to, well, switch between the two physical BIOS chips that are integrated on the board so even in the event of a bad flash you can quickly and easily switch to a completely different profile and you can use it to segment your experimentation profile from your daily driving profile. Finally on the back of the board we've got a CMOS clear button, ROG connect button, two USB 2.0 ports, six USB 3.0 ports, a gigabit ethernet port provided by an Intel chipset that's going to give you less overhead less throughput, less overhead and more throughput. We've also got display port and HDMI port supporting up to 4k display outs, optical audio and 7.1 audio out and last but not least and I really do still like to see this a PS2 keyboard mouse combo port. Sometimes PS2 just does work the best. On the back of the board we've got a couple more coolers for the MOSFETs and that is pretty much all she wrote about the Maximus 6 Extreme guys. Tune in for our overclocking guide on Haswell which is going to feature this board and the OC panel. Do like the video, do share the video and as always don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews and other computer videos.