Asus Maximus III Formula Review - PAGE 5

Speeding HDD

Clever marketing aside, this actually provides hardware RAID capability. Once a hard drive is connected into both red SATA ports, simply hop into the BIOS, choose between RAID 0, 1 or JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks) and you're set. No other configuration is needed and you don't have to load drivers before installing your operating system of choice. It's all very simple, but it's not quite perfect. Unfortunately, the P55 chipset and JMicron controller taking care of the work only support PCI-Express 1.0 so there's a 150 MB/s bandwidth limitation. For regular hard drives it's not much of an issue, but in the case of solid state drives, it will without a doubt hinder performance.

ProbeIt

This is especially interesting for the hardcore overclocking crowd with a voltmeter within their toolbox. It provides hardware voltage reading points for the processor's PLL, PCH, memory, integrated memory controller and processor. They are located right on the edge of the board, beside the 24-pin ATX connector, which makes them very easy to access. They just work and provide accurate voltage readings for the most critical components. However, they could be larger to make them easier to target.

Q-LED

Although it's hardly advertised, I found this feature to be one of the most useful ones. Instead of displaying various meaningless codes you have to search for on a couple 7 segment LED displays, it simply uses four small LEDs to display the most common errors. There is one for the processor, memory, video card and boot device. When the system boots perfectly, they will light up one after the other and all is well. However, if for some reason the system fails to boot, it will remain stuck on one of the four LED's, clearly indicating what is the issue.

SupremeFX X-Fi

While many of us settle with integrated sound, the discrete card bundled with the Formula certainly adds some value to the package. I have, at best, a sub-par computer sound system so I can't honestly say I noticed any difference. However, the software bundle provides tools like an equalizer and built-in sound profiles. Pretty much what you should expect from a quality sound card.

More

Of course, the Maximus III Formula also features various other small, but notable details. Marketed as Q-Slot, the latches to release cards placed into the full length PCI-E are easily the best I ever used. Unlike other designs, their shape makes them perfectly suited for human fingers and I didn't feel like I was going to break something every time I removed a video card.

ASUS' Q-DIMM memory slots only have levers on the topmost side, making it painless to install or uninstall memory sticks even when a large video card is sitting right under. Even though they only clip on one side, they are still laying tight enough into the slot that it is impossible for them to release without human intervention.

Speaking of memory, running four 2GB sticks for a total of 8GB worked right out of the box without needing any sort of tweaking.

The board also has the now usual onboard power, reset and clear CMOS buttons. Finally, it has a whooping eight 4-pin fan connectors each supporting 24W or up to a total of 84W. Assuming you install all eight fans, this is about for each fan, which is above what most of them draw.

When it comes to power delivery, ASUS supplies the processor with a 16 phase system while the integrated memory controller and memory each get a generous three phases.