ASUS Maximus III Formula LGA1156 Motherboard Review‏

A Closer Look at the Maximus III Formula

As we have come to expect, ASUS has pretty much nailed the overall layout. The 8-pin CPU power connector and 24-pin ATX power connector are placed right on the edge of the motherboard, all the other connectors and headers are ideally located on the edges. As always, we're a fan of the red & black RoG theme, but that large southbridge heatsink has a rather uninspired design.


Obviously, the centerpiece of this CPU socket area is the mighty looking PWM design. With 16 phases for the CPU and 3 phases for the VTT/Uncore, this is the same design as on P7P55D Deluxe. The MOSFETs are cooled by very low profile heatsinks and connected to each other by a thick, flattened heatpipe. As you can see, ASUS have put a small army of solid state capacitors in and around the CPU socket, which might be a little problematic for those who need insulate the socket for extreme cooling sessions. However, this is par for the course on every P55 motherboard that we have come across thus far.


Proving their superior attention to detail, ASUS have wisely put a small piece of plastic right under the retention lever. This is important because with the new LGA1156 mounting design, that little lever can be pushed down far enough to actually scratch the PCB and potentially damage an electrical trace. For those who are curious, the Maximus III Formula is outfitted with a Foxconn socket and retention module. Despite all that you may have heard, there is no reason to be concerned with Foxconn sockets. There were a few incidents with this socket across several brands, but the likelyhood of it happening to you (even under extreme OC'ing conditions) is not any greater than having a capacitor rupture or MOSFET fail, which is to say very, very unlikely.


The DDR3 memory slots feature a 3-phase power design, and support overclocked memory frequencies up to DDR3-2133. The Q-DIMM memory slot design, which is clip-less on one end, has wisely been implemented on this model. The reason for this innovative design is to prevent the clips from coming into contact with the back of the graphics card. However, on the MIIIF the gap is so large that this would never be an issue.


Those of you familiar with ASUS motherboards might mistake the little red knob as the MemOk! button, but it is in fact the new Go Button which serves two functions. When you press the button before posting it will enable the MemOk! feature, but if you press it while in Windows, it will overclock the system based on a preset profile that can be set in the BIOS.

ProbeIt is a series of 5 voltage read points on the motherboard, which is obviously a must-have feature on a enthusiast-oriented model. To be honest though, while read points are nice, we would have liked to see a secondary design whereby voltmeter leads could be attached directly to the motherboard via cables, like on the Rampage II Extreme or even the MSI P55-GD80.


Here we have the huge, rather boring looking southbridge cooler. Frankly, it's very much overkill for the tiny and cool-running P55 PCH. The MIIIF features six right-angle SATA II (3Gb/s) ports, which are supplied by the P55 chipset, support RAID 0/1/5/10. The two red SATA ports are provided by the JMicron JMB322 controller, and are used for Speeding HDD RAID-0 feature. The two JMicron JMB363 controllers supply the two white SATA ports, which are there to plug your optical disk drives (ODD) into. This motherboard features a socket BIOS chip, which is great, but we would definitely like to see a two chip design for redundancy purposes.