Once the heatsink is back in place (don't worry I reapplied the thermal paste) we can look more closely at the remainder of the motherboard.

Beginning at the top of the board we can see the CPU and DDR3 sockets. A fairly standard layout which could mean that larger 'high end' CPU heatsinks might interfere with some of the larger heatsinked DDR3 dimms we see today.


CPU and DDR3 sockets.

To the right of the DIMM slots we see some standard (for RoG boards) features. The very useful start and reset buttons and ASUS' excellent 'Core Unlocker' are there as are the excellent 'Probe It' voltage monitoring points. A new feature delivered by this board is the PCIe x16 Lane Switch - as its name suggests this feature allows the user to deactivate any given lane (or lanes) at the flick of a switch. A users could utilise this for fault detection or simply to deactivate specific PCIe lanes for GPU comparison and testing.


PCIe Lane Switch is a useful new feature.

Below these are the 'Go Button' recovery feature, the 24pin ATX connector and the BIOS battery. Just below the ATX connector you can see the four system status lights - these help to identify issues during system boot failures.


Status lights help identify issues.

SATA storage is not going to be an issue with 8 sockets available. The red ones are SATA 3 - 6.0Gb/s capable while the remaining two (provided by the JMicron 363 controller) are only standard SATA 2 - 3.0Gb/s.


SATA sockets.

At the base of the board, just below the SATA sockets, we find the dual bios chips and the bios switch button. This is not only a wonderful failsafe feature but also allows the end user to set a lower speed 24/7 overclock on one and a high speed benching style overclock on the other. You can see tiny yellow LED's at the base of each BIOS chip - each will illuminate as it is activated. Also present are the front panel pins for the motherboard. As ever ASUS have provided their excellent Q-Connector for fiddle free installation.


The two BIOS chips.

Between these and the southbridge heatsink we find a selection of RoG chips. These all support the iRoG feature set to allow remote clocking and almost full system manipulation and monitoring. With RoG iDirect and RC Bluetooth it can all be done remotely and these are the chipsets that allow it.


The iRoG chips.

These remote features may seem somewhat gimicky now, but as with all bleeding edge technology like this they will help develop future integrated features like many of the ones we take for granted today. The ability to monitor your system's voltages, temperatures and clock speeds using a compatible Bluetooth enabled device is actually quite a novel but nice approach. Imagine being able to check all those parameters while gaming - no need to stop and minimise your session since all the information is there in front of you on your phone!

The final portion of the board is the I/O plate. In the case of the Crosshair IV Extreme there's a great deal going on! There's a keyboard PS2 socket, a CMOS clear switch, 6x USB 2.0 sockets, 2x USB 3.0 sockets (in blue), a SPDIF optical output, an IEEE 1394a firewire port, 2x external SATA 3.0Gb/s ports, a gigabit LAN port, RoG Connect switch next to the vertically orientated RoG Connect USB socket and the standard 8 channel analogue audio sockets.


The I/O plate.