ASUS Crosshair III Formula AM3 Motherboard Review

Overclocking Results

With the Republic of Gamers boards dedicated to overclocking, anticipation was building as the board was prepped for overclocking.

As seen in the previous BIOS section, the Crosshair gives the user incredible control over every aspect of the BIOS and features excellent monitoring capabilities. Unfortunately, overclocking is a team effort in which all the players have to perform to the best of their abilities and in this case, both primary and backup players failed to deliver their "A" game.

The AMD Phenom II X4 955 used in our testing was known to already be affected by an incredibly pesky case of CPU flu that limited its maximum overclock to a modest 3.8GHz, so the assistance of a second player, the Phenom II X3 720 was requested. As such, even though our overclocks here are quite modest, we knew that this Asus board had much more left in its tank.


Auto Overclock Results

One of the the most convenient features of the Crosshair III that can also be found on a few other Asus motherboards, is the "CPU Level Up" control. It simply adjusts your system speed to one of three preset values, typically in increments of 200MHZ. The user can quickly select the option they wish to run at, and the Asus presets take over, adjusting everything from bus speed and ram to voltages. The idea is that with one simple setting users can achieve up to a 20% performance boost. Marvelously, it accomplished exactly that. Given that our X4 955 topped out at this speed it was the perfect compromise. No further adjustments were needed since the board manually set the voltage (maybe a bit to generously) and it proved to be 100% stable upon first boot. This was also the case with the X3 720, which required no tuning to get it running at the maximum level up.

As such, this was the setting that we opted to run all of our overclocking benchmarks on. It should hopefully be easily obtainable for most users provided they have proper cooling and a decent processor.




Maxmimum Bus Speed

Sadly, our Phenom II X4 955 didn't have much left from its level up settings. The maximum bus speed it was able to achieve was 240MHz. Somewhat fortunately, we were able to call a rookie X3 720 from the bench to make its first debut. It didn't fair much better. The maximum obtainable stable bus speed was a only 245MHz . Surmising that it could in fact be due to the motherboard's limitations, the chip was tested on a second AM3 motherboard and managed to squeak out 251MHz. An absolutely dismal performance given that many reports of these chips see them reaching above the 300MHz mark, and routinely at least pushing 275MHz.

Nevertheless, the motherboard was ruled out as the culprit and goes to show that while your motherboard is crucial, your other hardware needs to be up to the task as well.




Maxmimum Stable Overclock

On a brighter note, bus speed is not nearly as critical when it comes to reaching for the highest stable overclock with a unlocked Black Edition processor. Being able to play with the multiplier can be savior when one experiences a major set-back like our bus speed limitation. It also proved that the Crosshair III Formula is no slouch.

Again using our X3 720, the highest maximum overclock we had been able to achieve on our secondary board was 3.93GHz - the Crosshair ate the record, digested it and left it in a pile miles behind. Operating at a teetering 1.55v the processor achieved the sweet 4.0GHz trophy!




Maximum Memory Overclock

The Crosshair III calmly took the Aeneon DDR3-1333 up to a modest 1600MHz (802MHz) with the timings at a stock 8-8-8-15 and auto voltage of 1.6v without much tweaking or fiddling, unfortunately despite further pursuits, that was about where stability stopped for that particular setup. These were the settings we would continue with for our benchmarks in the next chapter due to the ease of achievement. Loosening the timings to 10-10-10-29, something a little more modest than most would enthusiasts bother to be proud of, a 100MHz extra was achieved!.

As AMD's AM3 CPUs continue with the trend of hosting the memory controller on the CPU itself, it requires a team effort by all components to pull off stability. The AM3 processors have been known to hit a few walls in most of our AM3 reviews, despite the board or the ram. The Crosshair III Formula manages to push the ram into some of the highest clock speeds seen with CL9+ timings with an AM3 setup, boding well for its ability to handle whatever hardware is thrown at it.