ASUS RoG Maximus III Formula Lynnfield Motherboard Preview

The Maximus III Formula: A Whirlwind Tour

Continuing our tour around the board, we come to the DDR3 memory slots which are color coded in black and red. Power is provided by a robust 3 phase design. We can also see that there are a pair of oddly placed white SATA connectors which are used for SATA ODD devices.

Next to the memory slots is what ASUS calls their GO Button. This button along with its accompanying red LED allows you to quickly diagnose and recover from memory errors (when overclocking or otherwise) by loading a preset, known-good MemOK! profile. This should make unrecoverable memory crashes a thing of the past.

ASUS has also included voltage read points near the main ATX connector. They allow you to take on-the-fly voltages with a multimeter for the CPU PLL, PCH, Memory, IMC and the CPU.


The heatsink over the PCH has a pretty large footprint but like the ones around the CPU socket, it is extremely short when compared to the giants we have seen on past X58 and P45 boards. Since the P55 PCH doesn’t produce much heat, its numerous fins and orientation in relation to in-case airflow should make it more than sufficient.

At the edge of the board there are a total of six additional right-angle SATA 3.0Gb/s connectors which run directly off of the P55 chipset. This may not seem like many for those of you with huge RAID arrays but there are some additional features of this board which will help in this respect.


The bottom edge of the Maximus III Formula holds a ton of goodies. To the far right there are the usual front-panel input connectors as well as a removable 16MB AMI BIOS chip but one of the more interesting features centers around those two mysteriously-placed SATA connectors. ASUS has specifically set these up for hardware RAID support for two connected HDDs. Basically, plugging a hard drive into each of the two connectors allows you the ability to quickly build a RAID array during either the POST message by pressing F10, through the usual BIOS menus or through a provided Windows application. This can all be done without the sometimes-clunky RAID drivers some manufacturers use.

Further along the bottom axis, there is the usual Firewire connector as well as a pair of fan headers and additional USB connectors. However, what really attracted our attention was the huge red Start button along with a conveniently-placed Reset button. These buttons are specifically targeted towards enthusiasts who want to use their system on an open test bench instead of within a case.