Layout

ASUS provided the Maximus III Extreme with black PCB. The memory were painted in red and the heatpipe is covered in black and red. Also the expansion slots are red. The layout in general is well thought but power-, reset and CMOS buttons could have been positioned a bit better. If you use a multi GPU solution these buttons will be covered completely.

To deliver a stable current supply ASUS provides an eight plus two phase power design. The CPU therefore gets eight phases and the motherboards core components two. Looking at the capacitors ASUS uses All-Solid-Cap's which have a MTBF of 50'000 hours.

Totally you'll find four DIMM-slots on the Crosshair IV Formula. Officially supported are DDR3-1066/1333/1600(OC)/1800(OC)/2000(OC) with up to 16 GByte capacity.

North- and Southbridge as well as current voltage converters are being held at adequate temperatures via a passive heatpipe cooling solution. There is also plenty of space around the CPU socket to install even todays biggest aircooler without encountering any problems.