ASUS Maximus VI Impact packs a pint-sized punch

Hardware

June 10, 2013

ASUS has announced the launch of the first ROG gaming-grade motherboard for Intel’s Haswell family of processors – and boy, does it look good!

Its called the Maximus VI Impact and its proof that dynamite comes in small packages. It uses the Z87 chipset and the LGA1150 socket. It features the standard two DDR3 RAM slots, a single PCI-E 3.0 16x slot, four SATA 6GB/s ports, front-panel USB 3.0 and a host of post options including HDMI, Displayport, eSATA and gigabit Ethernet. But that’s not what makes it special.

ASUS Maximus VI Impact

Its the design that’s catchy. There are power and reset switches as well as a debug LED on the I/O panel. There’s a big, red Start button on the board itself. The capacitors, all of them Japanese, are coated in a chrome metal shell.

But the biggest changes are the add-on boards. There’s a ten-phase VRM capacitor bank that sits on its own PCB at 90º to the board’s surface, covered in a neat plastic shroud with the ROG logo. There’s also a professional-grade SupremeFX sound card complimented with a built audio amplifier running up to 115 decibels, alongside a mPCI-E combo card that houses a 802.11ac WiFi card and Bluetooth 4.0.

The ROG Maximus IV Impact will use the same BIOS as its bigger brothers and will support up to 32GB of DDR3-3000 memory. ASUS didn’t mention pricing, although with premium features like these it would easily extend over the R3,000 price range when it lands locally.