Fazit

The ASUS Maximus III Formula, a derivate from the ROG series, has been developped especially for gamers and overclockers. Therefore it brings absolutely no shame at all to its name because the good layout, easy overclocking, good gaming performance as well as superb optics are very good reasons to win a gamers or overclockers heart.

The Maximus III Formula leaves a well structured and clean impression. The colours are well chosen and the optics are a really convincing reason for this product. Using SATA connectors which were angled by 90 degrees there will be no problems when installing huge graphics cards as for example a Radeon HD 5970. The only issue we spotted is the fact that when you use three graphics cards you wont be able to use the connectors at the bottom edge of the mainboard.

Also the motherboards performance is good and especially in the gaming benchmarks it is really able to show its muscles. On the other hand if we look at the memory bandwidth benchmarks we see that it struggles a bit.

Doing overclocking the Maximus III Formula really shows what it's built for. With the ROG-Connector you can do overclocking settings "on the fly" using another PC without putting the overclocked system under any load. Furthermore the motherboard is also very forgiving if you choose the wrong settings. In this case it doesn't matter if you choose settings which are massively to high on purpose or not. In nearly every situation the board goes back into setup defaults an reboots into the very clearly arranged BIOS.

With the Maximus III Formula ASUS has a high-end motherboard for the socket 1156 in its portfolio which is almost perfect. We can recommend this board to any kind of gamers or overclockers which want to get maximum performance with a platform that has a reasonable price tag.

The ASUS Maximus III Formula can be bought at Digitec to a price of CHF 290.- (est. EUR 193.-).

Page 1 - Introduction	Page 8 - SiSoft Sandra 1
Page 2 - Specifications / Delivery	Page 9 - SiSoft Sandra 2
Page 3 - Layout	Page 10 - Super Pi / wPrime
Page 4 - Connectors and I/O	Page 11 - Games
Page 5 - BIOSS	Page 12 - Overclocking
Page 6 - Test setup	Page 13 - Conclusion
Page 7 - Futuremark

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Author: m.salathe@ocaholic.ch Copy edited and translated: m.buechel@ocaholic.ch