<p><span style="font-size: small;">Uncharacteristically late for ASUS, the P55 based Maximus III Extreme was rolled out to retail a couple of weeks ago.</span></p> <p><span style="font-size: small;"> ASUS&rsquo;s &ldquo;M3E&rdquo; follows in the footsteps of boards from EVGA and MSI, by teaming up nViida&rsquo;s NF200 chipset to multiplex sixteen native PCIe lanes out to provide additional front-end bandwidth for multiple graphics cards and other devices. Overall, it&rsquo;s not a solution that ends up high on most enthusiast shortlists because Intel&rsquo;s X58 seems to be the logical choice and offers superlative performance in almost every way over the &ldquo;lesser&rdquo; P55.</span></p> <p><span style="font-size: small;">&nbsp;The truth is, we&rsquo;re waiting on vendors to send us their second-gen X58 motherboards so that we can provide you with a round-up of which makes the best buy. As we&rsquo;ve probably got a few weeks before things will be ready, a review of the M3E is the first of our time fillers, to be followed by a test of&nbsp;the mini-ITX&nbsp;ECS H55H-I next week. On top of that,&nbsp;Richard will be taking a look at Gigabyte's P55A-UD7 shortly, and we've also got AMD&nbsp;890FX boards&nbsp;to squeeze in somewhere. Put simply, lots to do but so little time.</span></p> <p><span style="font-size: small;"> Back to what's going down today, given the limited demand for $349 P55 boards, we&rsquo;ll spare you any further drivel and get down to the facts...</span></p> <p><a target="_blank" href="http://www.anandtech.com/show/3671/asus-m3e"><span style="font-size: small;">Read more</span></a></p> <p>&nbsp;</p>