Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)I've built quite a few PCs and have seen motherboards evolve over time dramatically. The Asus Formula III is one of the most customizeable motherboards for overclockers I've ever seen. It also has the proper safeguards in place just in case an overzealous overclocker attempts to push the hardware too far. I'll say right off the bat that this board may be overkill for the user who does not intend to overclock their machine, but there are some factors about it that can still justify its purchase. First, it has 10 SATA ports. Two of them are slated for SATA optical drives and the others are slated for hard drives. I paired this board up with a Lian-Li full tower case -- it can hold more hard drives than I have SATA ports for, but 10 SATA devices allows for a lot of hard drive capacity! One of the things I found the most useful was the inclusion of LEDs that blink from system power on till POST. I had problems getting my machine to POST at first, and the LEDs indicated that it was stuck on the RAM stage of POSTing - Solved the problem in under a minute.
I'm sure someone may be wondering about the sound quality of the SuprmeFX X-Fi discrete sound card -- I own the Creative ExtremeMusic PCI-E sound card in another system, and being the audiophile, I like clean sound and being a gamer, I like being able to distinguish directional sound. I can say that I like the sound quality the included sound card puts out, though I did hear a buzzing noise when I hooked up my case's front case ports for sound to the rear of the sound card. I haven't fully tested it yet, but I believe that has more to do with the case cables used rather than the sound card itself. When I plug in headphones directly to the external-facing ports, sound is very clean, crisp, clear. The EAX effects are very good as well.
I paired the i7 860 with the Zalman CNPS1X and was able to turn the cooler sideways, so that the fan is facing the back f the case instead of down or up - this allowed me to not block any of the available RAM slots. The motehrboard feels very solid, especially considering it has a massive heatsink/fan attached to the processor.
One of the coolest features which I admittedly have not tried yet is the iROG connector. Made of basically a USB cable with both ends having USA B heads, owners of this board can hook up another computer (laptop/netbook, etc) to connect to the motherboard and set the timings and other core settings on the motherboard from a remote computer.
Click Here to see more reviews about: ASUS Maximus III Formula - LGA 1156 - Intel P55 - DDR3 - Republic of Gamers - ATX Motherboard
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