Layout

The Crosshair V Formula-Z comes with the typical ROG color scheme which is based on black and red. In this case the PCB comes with a black coating and also the northbridge, southbridge and current converter cooling blocks are black. Red are the PCI-Express x16 slots, two DIMM slots as well as all the SATA ports. It seems like everything that symbolizes speed has been kept in red. Everything together ends up in a very nice and homogenous design which you might have been expecting already from an ROG-series motherboard.

ASUS provided their latest Crosshair V Formula-Z motherboard with a digital power design, whereas the CPU gets eight phases and the memory gets two phases. Looking at the capacitors themselves you'll find high quality caps around the CPU socket. These multilayer polymer capacitors offer advantages over other caps. Therefore super ML caps remain stable under regular as well as AC voltage, doesn't have an aging mechanism and are resilient under thermal shock.

Totally you'll find four DIMM-slots on the ASUS Crosshair V Formula-Z. Officially supported are DDR3 2400 (OC) / 2133 (OC) / 2000 (OC) / 1800 (OC) / 1600 / 1333 / 1066 MHz with up to 32 GByte capacity. There is plenty of space to install even big aircoolers and they shouldn't interfere with memory.

The current converters are being held at adequate temperatures via a passive heatpipe cooling solution. The southbridge got a passive cooling block which has not been integrated into the heatpipe loop of northbridge and VRM. The fact that the cooling blocks around the CPU socket aren't too big makes it comfortable to install a big aircooler. We also noticed the very high manufacturing quality of the cooling blocks and their weight which is quite immense.