The Asus ROG division is launching its Maximus VII Formula motherboard. This is the flagship Z97 motherboard from the ROG series of products, and comes with quite the hardware to back up that status.
Let's start with the basics. On the motherboard you will find an LGA1150 socket, which has support for not only Haswell and Haswell refresh processors, but also officially has support for the upcoming Intel Broadwell processors. At last, Broadwell support in LGA1150 sockets is confirmed. It was already safe to assume so, but it is nice to see it being indirectly confirmed.
Wired to the CPU socket are four DDR3 memory slots, as well as two PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slots, one PCI-Express 2.0 x16 slot (which only has wiring for four lanes), as well as three PCI-Express 2.0 x1 slots. Storage connectivity is handled by six native SATA3 (6 Gb/s) ports, as well as two SATA-Express ports, which also function as four SATA3 ports if unused. And there is an M.2 socket.
When looking at the board, the first thing you will notice, aside from the black and red color scheme, is the so-called thermal armor. This armor around the motherboard is meant to keep the temperatures in check, and as a bonus, this board also has built-in liquid cooling support for the VRM circuitry. You don't need to use it, but adding it to your water loop can be very cool. Asus calls this liquid cooling support CrossChill Hybrid cooling.
Regarding Asus features, the motherboard comes with the SupremeFX audio, the Digi+ III VRM circuitry, and Asus's Q-Slot, which makes securing or releasing a graphics card just a little easier.
The motherboard will come out in two flavors: a standard version, and a version that comes bundled with a Watch_Dogs download code. Pricing is set at $319 and $369, respectively, so if you want the Watch_Dogs game either get it through here if there's a good deal, or buy it separately.
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