ASUS Crosshair III Formula AM3 Motherboard Review

Voltage Regulation and Temperature Testing

For a variety of unknown and frustrating reasons, monitoring the voltage regulation was not possible with the Crosshair III Formula. Software failed to recognize any Vcore voltages in testing over a half-dozen different pieces of software, and physical voltage reading was not possible as a result of a lack of information, documentation and seemingly malfunctioning monitoring tools.

These issues are likely just isolated with the review sample and not present across the whole lineup.

As seen in the BIOS section, the motherboard does have load line calibration which can be enabled or disabled if necessary. Keeping LLC enabled will reduce issues with Vdroop and it has proved to be effective in minimizing voltage irregularities, however in general it is not necessary for regular use and modest over-clocking.

With a good pound of metal covering the major chips on the board, and Asus' new pin fin cooling design, good heat dissipation could be expected from the one piece cooler, and it didn't disappoint. Ambient temperatures were a little less than ideal, with the room air hovering at roughly 25C.

The system was run for one hour under full load of Orthos as well as an ATI Stress testing tool running on the CPU. Aside from the two CPU heatsinks fans, no other fans cooled the system; the unit was run in an open air environment.


The cooling performance was impeccable, the joint heatsink heat dissipation appears to worked exactly as intended - minimizing heat load across all chips. While the pin fin "technology" may seem gimmicky, it does appear to have paid off with lower idle to load temperature jumps and overall cooler temperatures, even given the higher room temp.