ASUS Maximus III Formula LGA1156 Motherboard Review‏

Overclocking Results

If you are buying or building a Lynnfield/P55 system chances are that you don't already own a Core i7/X58 system. Many of you will likely be transitioning over from Intel Core 2-based systems and you have to realize that overclocking Core i5/i7 processors is quite different than with the previous Core 2 architecture. There are now four important clock speeds (CPU/BCLK/MEM/QPI) and three multipliers (CPU/MEM/QPI) to tweak, as well as five different voltages. Put simply, there are lot of new variables and potential limitations that an overclocker must now take into consideration. At the moment, no one is an expert when it comes to Lynnfield overclocking, and we are all learning new tricks and tweaks on a weekly basis. At this point in time, for our overclocking tests we have a imposed a few relatively conservative voltage limits, namely vCore up to 1.40 vCore, VTT/IMC up to 1.35V, and vDIMM up to 1.70V. It is our estimation that these voltages can be safely used 24/7 without seriously shortening the lifespan of any components...with proper cooling of course.

Highest Stable BCLK Overclock

By now we are very familiar with the limits of our two Lynnfield samples on air cooling. As a result, we know not to expect one P55 motherboard to greatly distinguish itself from the others. Therefore, as long as we can reach those limits, we can consider a particular model a solid overclocker.

On the Maximus III Formula, we were able to push our i5-750 chip to 214.6Mhz BLCK with 1.21V VTT/IMC. This is very much equal to the 215.5Mhz we achieved with the MSI P55-GD80, and a fair bit better than the 212.6Mhz that the ASUS P7P55D Deluxe was capable of.

Our voltage-hungry i7-870 was able to hit 203.6Mhz at 1.35V VTT/IMC, which is a new high. This is slightly better than the 201.5Mhz achieved with the P55-GD80 and 202.7Mhz that was done with the P7P55D. Chances are that your i7-800 series will be a better BCLK overclockers than our engineering samples, since we seen several retail chips that are stable in the 210-215Mhz BCLK range.

Highest Stable CPU Overclock

CPU core overclocking is one area where the Maximus III Formula was able to pull away from the pack a little bit. Specifically, we were able to achieve two personal records on our chips, 4106.5Mhz at 1.40 vCore on the i5-750, and 4067.2Mhz at 1.35 vCore on the i7-870. Respectively, these results are 18Mhz and 22Mhz better than on the P7P55D Deluxe, and a full 42Mhz and 45Mhz better than what we achieved with the P55-GD80. Not too shabby at all, even though it's really only a 1-2Mhz BLCK difference.

Highest Stable Memory Overclock

While searching for the highest stable memory overclock, we pushed aside our i5-750 due to its weak IMC and focused on the i7-870. In doing so, we were able to achieve a impressive DDR3-2200/PC3-17600 9-9-9-24-1T with 1.65Vdimm and our self-imposed 1.35V VTT/IMC voltage limit. This is exactly the same as we were able to achieve with the P7P55D Deluxe, and a little better than the DDR3-2167 that we hit with the MSI P55-GD80.

Auto Overclocking Results

Now automatic overclocking solutions are nothing new, most of us have encountered them in one way or another for quite a few years now. However, they have historically been shockingly ineffective. They either a) didn't work as advertised and locked up your system, or b) worked as advertised and locked up your system. Either way, they were not a joy to use and the results were inevitably disappointing. Is ASUS's implementation truly better? Let's find out!


While the above results are what were able to manually achieve with this motherboard, the Maximus III Formula is outfitted with the Auto Tuning automatic overclocking feature is a software-based solution that can be found within the new & improved TurboV EVO utility.

Once you enlarge the above TurboV image, you can see that Auto Tuning has two modes, Performance and Extreme. At this point in time, ASUS advises that people use the performance preset since that is where the most work has been done in optimizing the algorithm and stability testing. Let's see what it can do:


Overall, Auto Tuning is quite good. Keep in mind, that is the same auto-overclocking utility that we saw on the P7P55D Deluxe, and yet the results here are quite a bit better, at least on the i5-750.

Now this isn't quite rocket science yet. This feature can taken up to 20-30 minutes and it's not always going to give the same results. Sometimes the it would stop at 3.1Ghz, sometimes at 3.3Ghz. However, we just kept looping it until it achieved what we believed was the highest possible overclock. We aren't too sure why ASUS engineers have decided to undervolt the memory in Auto Tuning, but given the the very mild memory frequencies and timings it selects this is not big deal. We do wish that the program was better at reading the memory SPD to better utilize memory modules truly capabilities. Thankfully, ASUS is constantly working on making this feature better, so we can expect it to get better with future BIOS updates.

Frankly, our main complaint is that ASUS did not include the BIOS-based OC Tuner Utility, which proved to achieve much higher results than Auto Tuning when we tested it on the P7P55D Deluxe. However, given the fact that this is an enthusiast-oriented motheboard, it could be argued that auto-overclocking features are pointless since they go against the very reason for such a model.