ASUS Crosshair III Formula Motherboard Review :: Layout

Starting on the upper right hand corner we find the 8-pin power connector. This is the normal position for the power connector as it leads straight from the PSU to the motherboard without affecting the CPU cooler or other wires. The CPU Socket which is an AM3 socket lies under the rear I/O and the heatsink covering MOSFETs. A row of low-profile solid capacitors is above the CPU Socket and there is room for aftermarket CPU coolers if needed. The 4-pin CPU fan header is above the 8-pin power connector.

The Northbridge which is the AMD 790FX chipset is covered by a heatsink with one heat pipe leading out to the rear heatsink and the other leading out to the SB750 Southbridge. The Republic Of Gamers chip is under the 2nd PCI Express slot. Under the CPU Socket are four DIMM Sockets for the memory. The memory controller is on the CPU and supports up to 16GB of DDR3 memory clocked as noted above at up 1600MHz when the CPU is overclocked. Two 3-pin fan connectors are on the bottom right hand corner of the board.

To the left of the bottom 3-pin header is the 24-pin power connector. Next to that is the Primary IDE connector. To the left of that are four sideways facing SATA connectors with a fifth SATA connector facing up. The positioning of the SATA connectors does not block a long video card as the SATA controllers are sideways facing. This is a great feature for those having long gaming video cards like the ATI Radeon HD 4870 x2. The Front Panel IO is to the left of the SATA ports. Every connection is labeled so installing the FP I/O wrong is impossible, especially with the Q-Connector.

To the left of the FP I/O are the MemOk, Start and Reset buttons. The Start button is a bright red color that says Start. The reset button is a smaller button with a black color. The MEMOk button is a small red button. There are three USB 2.0 headers to the left of the Start button. Rounding out the device headers is a IEEE-1394 header for Firewire. A 4-pin Fan connector is to the left of the IEEE-1394 header. The top of the board has two 4-pin Fan connectors.

There are two PCI Express x16 Generation 2 slots on the board separated with enough room to fit two dual-slot video cards. The expansion is laid out PCI Express x1, PCI Express x16, PCI Express x1, PCI, PCI Express x16, and PCI Express x1. If you want to install two HD 4870 X2s there is plenty of space for them on the board with proper room for airflow as well. There is an IT8720F chip on the board, which monitors temperatures and voltages of the board.

The rear I/O on the board consists of a single PS/2 port for the keyboard or mouse, six USB 2.0 ports bringing up the total supported on the board to 12, a RJ-45 jack for the onboard Gigabit Ethernet controller, a Clear CMOS button, an external SATA port and a IEEE-1394a port for the Firewire bringing the total of those ports to two available. The onboard sound on the board is provided by a SupremeFX X-Fi card. This card is fully compliant with the Microsoft High Definition Audio standard but has a slew of other features including support for Creative Labs' EAX 3.0 and 4.0 extensions. ASUS motherboards are the only ones on the market in selected boards to support EAX 4.0; most boards only support EAX 2.0 as part of Microsoft's audio standards.