ASUS Maximus III Gene Motherboard

On-Board Peripherals

Intel P55 chipset is a single-chip solution. The basic features provided by this chipset include six SATA-300 ports (RAID support is optional), no support for parallel ATA (PATA) ports, 14 USB 2.0 ports supporting port disable, embedded Gigabit Ethernet MAC (Medium Access Control) and eight x1 PCI Express lanes.

ASUS Maximus III Gene provides all the six SATA-300 ports with support for Intel Matrix Storage, which provides RAID 0, 1, 5, and 10. These ports are placed on the edge of the motherboard rotated 90°, so video cards won’t block them. A seventh SATA-300 port is available (mounted vertically), controlled by a JMicron JMB363 chip, which also controls the eSATA-300 port available on the rear panel. There are no SATA-600 ports.

There are also no parallel ATA (PATA, a.k.a. IDE) ports nor a floppy disk drive controller.

Figure 4: SATA ports.

This motherboard has 14 USB 2.0 ports, nine soldered on the rear panel (one exclusive for the "ROG Connect" feature, which allows you to control overclocking settings in real time using another computer) and five available on three motherboard headers. Notice that because of this even number of ports, one of the motherboard headers supports only one USB port and not two as it usually happens. Therefore you have to pay attention when installing the USB cable coming from the front panel of your case to make sure you install it on a header that has two USB ports. ASUS Maximum III Gene doesn’t come with USB 3.0 ports.

Two FireWire (IEEE1394) ports are provided, one standard-sized on the rear panel and one through a header on the motherboard, controlled by a VIA VT6315N chip.

Eight-channel audio is generated by the chipset using a VIA VT2020 codec. Unfortunately this component isn’t listed on VIA’s website; the only information we could find out is that it presents a 110 dB signal-to-noise ratio on its outputs, which is a professional-grade number. The motherboard comes with an on-board optical SPDIF output and you can add a coaxial SPDIF output installing an adapter on the motherboard “SPDIF_OUT” header. You can also connect this output to your video card, so you can use an HDMI port with both video and audio signals.

ASUS Maximus III Gene has one Gigabit Ethernet port controlled by a Realtek RTL8112L chip, which is connected to the system using a PCI Express x1 lane and thus not presenting any potential performance issues. Curiously, this chip isn’t listed at Realtek’s website.

ASUS says they made a survey among users and detected most buyers preferred one high-performance Ethernet port instead of two, and this is why their newer motherboards don’t come with two Gigabit Ethernet ports.