Intel's 500-series motherboards may be well behind us, having supported the 10th and 11th Gen Intel CPUs, but this rare hardware find is still interesting. Hardware enthusiast wxnod managed to get his hands on what appears to be a Maximus XIII Hero motherboard, adapted to use SO-DIMM memory modules instead of standard DIMMs.
The modified Maximus XIII Hero looks almost the same as the retail product. It's a motherboard from Asus' ROG lineup, but it humorously features a TUF Gaming cover for the LGA1200 socket. There's no fancy heatsink covering the PCIe 4.0 M.2 slots and Z590 chipset. Instead, the Z590 chipset has a run-of-the-mill heatsink with a TEM14280 code, which didn't return any results from a Google search.
The four DDR4 memory slots are gone in favor of four SO-DIMM memory slots. This Maximus XIII Hero is likely an engineering sample motherboard primarily used to test SO-DIMM memory modules. The sticker beside the primary PCIe 4.0 x16 expansion slot supports our theory. The label, which has the Kingston logo on it, shows Howard Wang as the engineer and Eva Luo as the issuer. Asus produced this Maximus XIII Hero in 2021, the same year the final product hit retail shelves.
