Asus Maximus III Formula Review

Stability

As usual we reset the BIOS to its default values and loaded up both Prime95 torture test and 3DMark06 looping to see if the board could withstand the stress to CPU, memory and PCI Express power draw for 24 hours. Apart from a fan to cool the CPU heatsink, there were no other fans used, meaning the heatsinks have to cope with very little airflow and not overheat.

We found the Asus Maximus III Formula ran 3DMark06 for the full 24 hours, but that Prime95 gave out and closed itself after just nine hours - a few hours less than both Gigabyte board, and the MSI we have tested previously. The system was still stable and usable after the test finished. Compared to the previous Asus P7P55D Deluxe which survived the full 24 hours, it's a disappointing result though.

Conclusion

We feel somewhat underwhelmed by the Maximus III Formula to be honest. On the surface it looks fantastic and has really interesting and novel features, however when we get into the specifics it has a few niggling issues.

First, the good: RoG connect is a really great feature we'd love to see on other motherboards in the future. While we don't expect it to gain fans from seasoned tweakers and overclockers, it's something different to use for quickly trying new settings, and it's a well designed interface which should appeal to a whole new set of people. If you don't care for it then you lose nothing because the BIOS is fantastic anyway, and if you don't have another PC you can always use the same TweakIT software on the Maximus itself.

Overclocking performance was good - exceptional CPU performance is marred by not quite top-of-the-class memory and base clock performance. General performance is very good as it regularly featured high on our tables of real world tests, and it's notably better than the P7P55D Deluxe we've previously seen from Asus. However, despite featuring ten SATA ports, the poor performance of the JMicron powered ones means we'd recommend thinking of this board as only having the native six. Use the extras for optical drives exclusively - if you can live with their poor positioning as well.


For £180 I'd have to really want a few extra 100MHz on my CPU and the RoG connect specifically. May we remind you that for this money you can buy a very good X58 motherboard and Core i7-920 that offers more, and for two thirds the cash you can get any number of P55 motherboards that do 95+ per cent the same thing.

I don't think Asus quite nailed this one: it needs to be the whole package, and with crappy SATA ports, overclocking that isn't quite the pinnacle of performance and a high price, it doesn't quite all pull together. That said, it's still very, very good and if you're unconcerned by the prices and these small criticisms, and are set on an LGA1156 system rather than 1366, then this shouldn't disappoint you.

• Features
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• -
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• 8/10

• Performance
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• -
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• 8/10

• Value
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• -
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• 6/10

• Overall
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• -
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• 8/10

Score Guide