ASUS Maximus III Formula

This motherboard belongs to ASUS ROG (Republic Of Gamers) series, and it is based on Intel P55 chipset. Since all ROG products have nice accessories this motherboard is no exception. Besides the motherboard itself, in the package were found very good manual, disc with drivers and additional applications, ROG sticker accompanied with set of stickers that can be used for hard drive marking. Since this motherboard has more than one SATA controller, hard drive stickers will get handy if you plan to build RAID systems. Of course 6 black quality SATA cables are also supplied. 3 of those have flat connectors while 3 SATA cables have one angled connector. In the package we also found USB/eSATA bracket for external storage devices.

This motherboard supports SLI and CrossFire but only one SLI bridge is supplied with it. Of course top quality ROG backplate is also present, along with discrete SupremeFX X-Fi sound card that can be inserted into PCIe x1 slot. Sound card is suited for gamers since it supports EAX4.0 standard and glows when connected thanks to blue LEDs present on the PCB. It also has coaxial and optical (S/PDIF) outputs so connecting any surround speakers can be done in just few minutes. One of the new features, when it comes to motherboards from ROG series, is presence of one USB cable with two male connectors, and it has a really “geeky” purpose. You know the situation when in Formula 1 engineers approach Formula 1 car, plug in notebook and download all telemetric data and tweak engine accordingly to drivers and others suggestions? Well, Maximus III Formula has similar feature, called ROG Connect, where this USB cable can get handy. Basically, when you power up a configuration based on this motherboard you can plug in with USB cable and connect to it second PC (or notebook) so you can see all POST codes and voltages in real-time thanks to application that can be installed from disc present in the package. Ultimate “geek” moment is the fact that same application can be used to overclock all parameters of the system in real-time. Except pure bragging “look I’m tuning my PC like a Formula 1 engineer” effect this can be useful for competitive overclockers that can disable few more drivers from Windows (like keyboard and mouse) and maybe squeeze few MHz more from components.

Maximus III Formula looks similar to all other ROG motherboards so far which means: black PCB, with black components and few red ones. Layout is very good. Intel P55 chipset has low thermal dissipation which allowed ASUS to use low profile cooling solution. This solution won’t present problems with CPU coolers of any size. Heat pipe system covers MOSFETs so even when extremely overclocked this system can be described as “cool”. This cooling system is connected to motherboard with screws which provides much better contact with components compared to plastic clips. Most of the 6 SATA 2.0 connectors are nicely positioned except white ones, which could be positioned closer to the edge of the PCB, instead below memory slots. Power and Reset buttons are also present so if you like to overclock, these are good news for you. PCIe and PCI slot layout is perfect. Even PCIe x16 slots are nicely distanced, so even if you decide to go with few graphics card they will be nicely distanced one from each other. We should mention that red PCIe x16 slots operate in 8x mode if more than one graphics card is used, but in case only one is used, first operates at x16 mode. Changing memory modules when graphics card is present in PCIe slot can be nightmare on some motherboards, but not on this one. Only upper DIMM clips are movable while bottom clips are fixed. And don’t worry, memory modules will be firmly secured in their slots.

On the back panel there is only one LAN connector, but there are 9 (nine) USB 2.0 ports. There is also one eSATA and one FireWire connector. Back panel has two special buttons: one is Clear CMOS and second one is used to activate, already mentioned, ROG Connect option. PS/2 connector is also present although, probably because of someone’s nostalgia. In vicinity of 24-pin power connector are located LEDs that should inform you if something goes wrong. Also, ASUS provided measuring spots for most of important parameters like CPU PLL, PCH, CPU Vcore, DRAM and IMC. Near those is located MemOK button that is used to loosen up memory latencies so you can boot up in case you went too far. Simply put, overclocker will find this motherboard as one of the best on the market at the moment.

One of the most interesting facts about this motherboard is the power unit that has 19 phases (nineteen). Of course not all of those are intended for CPU. 3 are reserved for VTT. Memory got next 3, which are also good news.

ASUS reserved 16MB for BIOS of Maximus III Formula. BIOS is signed by AMI, and it does have all the options that exist at the moment in the world, at least when it comes to motherboard BIOS options. We won’t describe them all, obviously, but instead will focus on most important. First of all, you won’t find yourself in voltage shortage situation. All multipliers for RAM exist, and we liked the fact that there was no voltage drop during CPU FULL LOAD combined with enabled Load Line Calibration option. Maximal stable CPU basic frequency was 218MHz. Nice. This means that you can raise multiplier, on some of the future Intel CPUs, up to 18, and make it operate at 3900MHz. Besides this, our Maximus III Formula managed to boot on higher BCLK and we managed to achieve stability on 223MHz. Since we used air cooled cooler this is great result. If you intend to use water cooling system higher values can be achieved.