One of the most common questions we received during early design stages of our Z68 motherboards was if we were going to design a high performance, Z68, mATX motherboard. Well, that's exactly what we've done by bringing you the ROG Maximus IV Gene-Z. This post and unboxing video will go over the Z68 chipset, ASUS specific features, board layout, and overall performance of the M4G-Z.

Not only is the M4G-Z our first mATX Z68 motherboard, it's also the first mATX board with our DIGI+ VRM to rival the power delivery of our X58 ROG motherboards. You can see some performance numbers in the benchmark section below to see just how powerful this small form factor motherboard really is. Like our H/P67 and other Z68 motherboards, the M4G-Z also sports our new UEFI which adds a new touch and feel and ease of usability to nagivating and making BIOS tweaks.

Some of the other key features of this motherboard which will be discussed in more detail below are Intel Gigabit LAN, ROG Connect, SLI and CrossfireX support, Mem TweakIt, GPU Tweak, GPU.DIMM, MemOK / Go Button, SupremeFX X-Fi 2 audio with gold-plated multi-channel jacks, Intel SRT Caching, and Lucid Virtu. These features along with its DIGI+ VRM and aggressive heatsink and heatpipe design make this Z68 board in my opinion our best and most powerful mATX motherboard to date!



Here are the specs for the board.


Not only does this board come equipped with the high-performing and very efficient Intel LAN controller, coupled with this adapter is our ROG exclusive software implementation of GameFirst which allows you to prioritize packets over the network to your liking. Regardless of which application(s) you want to ensure has the most bandwidth and lowest latency, GameFirst lets you manage your network with an unprecedented level of control. Say goodbye to high pings in your favorite FPS!:D



Some of the new features of M4G-Z's UEFI are GPU.DIMM and BIOS Print. GPU.DIMM allows the user at a glance to see what GPU's and DIMMs are installed and have been detected by the motherboard. It also shows what frequencies the corresponding components are operating at. This can be very helpful in detecting a bad DIMM in the unfortunate case that you do have a bad memory module.

Another cool feature of the UEFI is BIOS Print which allows you to take a screenshot of of the UEFI and save to a USB thumb drive to easily compare your BIOS settings with a friend. This can be a valuable tool for troubleshooting as well by capturing pertinent BIOS settings to a screenshot rather than having to type all of your settings when looking for help with an issue.



A key feature of the Z68 chipset is Intel's Smart Response Technology which allows you to combine a large capacity HDD with a fast SSD into 1 logical drive giving you a much faster system boot and much faster data transfer rates than you could obtain from a HDD by itself. It does this by caching the files that you use most often and by predicting what files you will need next and automatically caching them for you. This logical drive will give you about 80% of the performance of a high speed SSD while giving you 100% of the drive capacity of the HDD!



One of the differences between the Z68 and P67 chipsets is that Z68 gives you the ability to use the integrated video on your Sandy Bridge CPU. The M4G-Z has an HDMI port on the back panel for transmitting video and audio to your display. Another welcomed addition to this board is Lucid Virtu technology which allows you to simultaneously enjoy the enhanced graphics and DirectX 11 support of your new discrete GPU along with the superior transcoding abilities of the Sandy Bridge CPU's Quick Sync technology.





Something that overclockers have come to love on our ROG boards is ROG Connect which provides real-time overclocking of the system from another USB enabled device. On the M4G-Z, ROG Connect has been tweaked a bit with the white ROG Connect USB port no longer oriented vertically as it's now orented horizontally and located at the bottom of a stack of back panel USB ports. Also, there is now a switch on the board to enable/disable ROG Connect. ROG Connect also now allows you to tweak GPU settings as well using GPU TweakIt.



Another incredible feature and also the first of it's kind, is Mem TweakIt. Mem TweakIt is an ROG exclusive utility that allows you to make real-time changes to DRAM timings from within the OS! This utility also gives you a real-time DRAM Efficiency Score making it great for the die hard overclockers as well as those of you who just want the best performance out of your memory kits.



With all of this, the next image shows some of the bundled software that comes with this board.



Maximus IV Gene-Z Screen capture of PassMark Sleeper showing 10 passes without issue.


Maximus IV Gene-Z SATA6G Performance on Vertex3 driver ver. 1027


Maximus IV Gene-Z USB3 Performance Vertex3 on ASMedia adapter


Maximus IV Gene-Z MaxxMEM^2 Single


Maximus IV Extreme MaxxMEM^2 Single


Maximus IV Gene-Z MaxxMEM^2 Multi


Maximus IV Extreme MaxxMEM^2 Multi


The following table shows a performance comparison between the Maximus IV Gene-Z and the Maximus IV Extreme. The CPU used on both systems is i7-2600K at stock settings. The memory used is 2 x Corsair CMGS2GX3M1A2200C8 running at 1600 MHz 6-6-6-20 with Command Rate 1. Because of the memory divider, the 2600K is running at 3800 MHz. The GPU is GTX 580 at stock settings. OS is Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit. The boot device used is Corsair CSSD-F40GB2 40 GB.



For more information about the M4G-Z, check out JJ's unboxing video.