Asus Blitz: The ' Extreme' Intel P35 Express DDR3 Motherboard

Asus has had a lot of interesting motherboard offerings even since the P4P 800 series, which is flawlessly running on one of my test shuttle for three years now. Of all Asus' motherboard products, the Blitz line distinguishes the most by increased performance and state-of-the-art technology.

The Blitz series is dedicated to computer enthusiasts that price speed and performance most, at any price it may come. The new motherboard family from Asus is comprised of two mobos: the Asus BLITZ Extreme and the Asus BLITZ Formula. Both of them are absolutely identical, except for the fact that the Formula only supports DDR2 memory, while the Extreme edition comes with DDR3 support. The rest is unchanged, including the cooling system, the chipset or the CPU socket.

The Asustek Extreme is built with Intel's P35 series of chipsets with the P35 Express northbridge and the ICH9R Southbridge. It can recognize as much as 8 GB or DDR3 RAM clocked at 1333/1066/800 MHz. Since it is a professional motherboard, it comes with two Gigabit Ethernet ports onboard, two IEEE 1394a ports, 12 USB 2.0 slots, six Serial ATA II slots that can perform as RAID 0, 1, 5, 0+1 and JBOD, one IDE channel and full support for AMD's CrossFire technology.

The motherboard manufacturer also packed inside the box a crystal-clear, stand alone SupremeFX 11 8-channel audio card, a full version of the 3DMark06 benchmarking software and a copy of the STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl game.

The Blitz Extreme comes with 45-nanometer Intel Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad processors support, as well as any other processor that is compatible with the LGA 776 CPU socket and can support FSB speeds of 800/1066/1333MHz.

As I have already told you, the motherboard is a top choice and comes with a proportional price tag. It "only" costs $296, but add the costs of a quad-core Intel CPU, a professional watercooling solution and some rocket-fast memory modules and... here you go.