ASUS Maximus III Formula LGA1156 Motherboard Review‏

Synthetic Benchmarks

Lavalys Everest Ultimate v5.02

Everest Ultimate is the most useful tool for any and all benchmarkers or overclockers. With the ability to pick up most voltage, temperature, and fan sensors on almost every motherboard available, Everest provides the ability to customize the outputs in a number of forms on your desktop. We selected two of Everest's seven CPU benchmarks: CPU Queen and FPU Mandel. According to Lavalys, CPU Queen simple integer benchmark focuses on the branch prediction capabilities and the misprediction penalties of the CPU. It finds the solutions for the classic "Queens problem" on a 10 by 10 sized chessboard. At the same clock speed theoretically the processor with the shorter pipeline and smaller misprediction penalties will attain higher benchmark scores. The FPU Mandel benchmark measures the double precision (also known as 64-bit) floating-point performance through the computation of several frames of the popular "Mandelbrot" fractal. Both tests consume less than 1 MB system memory, and are HyperThreading, multi-processor (SMP) and multi-core (CMP) aware.


In stock form, all four motherboards are roughly equivalent in the CPU Queen benchmark, with a slight edge going towards both ASUS models. The Intel motherboard falls behind in the FPU Mandel test because both the ASUS and MSI models utilize a 1X higher Turbo Mode multiplier throughout the benchmark.


Lavalys Everest Ultimate v5.02

As part of its enthusiast favourite Cache & Memory Benchmark, Everest provides very useful and in-depth cache performance figures. For this chart, we have combined the read, write, and copy bandwidth figures to achieve an aggregate bandwidth figure for each cache stage.


Again, all four motherboards perform nearly identically across all three processor cache levels.


Lavalys Everest Ultimate v5.02

Everest Ultimate is the most useful tool for any and all benchmarkers or overclockers. With the ability to pick up most voltage, temperature, and fan sensors on almost every motherboard available, Everest provides the ability to customize the outputs in a number of forms on your desktop. In addition to this, the memory benchmarking utility provides a useful tool of measuring the changes to your memory sub-system.


At DDR3-1333 7-7-7, the Maximus III Formula performs inline with the other models that have tested.


As expected, the MIIIF achieved very similar latency figures to the P7P55D Deluxe, slightly surpassed the MSI P55-GD80. The DP55KG keeps its crown as latency champion at the moment, largely due to its more aggressive default secondary memory timings.


Now let's see if ScienceMark echoes these results.

ScienceMark v2.0

Although last updated almost 3 years ago, and despite its rudimentary interface, ScienceMark v2.0 remains a favorite for accurately calculating bandwidth on even the newest chipsets.


ScienceMark reveals the MIIIF to have the highest memory bandwidth of all four motherboards, but even then the difference between the models is only 2%.


ScienceMark does support Everest's results, with the MIIIF tying with the P7P55D and the Intel board having the lowest memory latency.

There's really not much to report here as all four motherboards are performing within less than 1-2% of each other in these popular synthetic benchmarks. Will the results be any different in real-life applications? Let's find out.