ASUS has showcased its upcoming Z77 chipset based ROG Maximus V Formula motherboard at the ASUS Z77 Press Conference in Taipei - The board brings back built in water cooling support along with several other features detailed below:
The motherboard is part of ASUS's Republic of Gamer Series aimed towards enthusiasts and overclockers. The Maximus V Formula features a large heatsink over at the VRM/MOSFET's which includes a hollow heatpipe through which water would be channeled through two cooling pipes. Cooled water would pass through one end of the heatpipe and cool the surroundings. ASUS call's the design Fusion Thermo System, Watercooling for the Z77 chipset isn't required since it doesn't gets too hot.
Expansion slots include 2 PCI-e x16 3.0 (x8/x8 electrical) along with a PCI-e x16 slot, 1 x PCI-e x4 and three PCI-e x1 slots are included, Support for SLI/CrossfireX is added. A PLX bridge chip was spotted which suggests there isn't enough bandwidth for the PCIe devices which has to be split from the Z77 chipset.
Storage includes four SATA 3Gbps and two SATA 6Gbps ports, There's also a second set of SATA 6Gbps ports. I/O includes four USB 2.0 ports, four USB 3.0 ports, an eSATA port, Gigabit Ethernet, 7.1-channel audio with optical S/PDIF, DisplayPort and HDMI connector. ASUS also added a mPCIe Combo pin header to allow support for an additional add on card or an an mSATA SSD. Other specs include pin headers for two USB 3.0 ports, four USB 2.0 ports, a POST80 debug LED, power and reset buttons and Voltage measuring points. The board is bundled with ThunderFX USB sound card and amplifier.
Pricing and Release Date is yet to be announced.
About the author: A Software Engineer by training and a PC enthusiast by passion, Hassan Mujtaba serves as Wccftech's Senior Editor for hardware section. With years of experience in the industry, he specializes in deep-dive technical analysis of next-generation CPU and GPU architectures, motherboards, and cooling solutions. His work involves not only breaking news on upcoming technologies but also extensive hands-on reviews and benchmarking.
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