ASUS Crosshair III Formula Motherboard Review :: Bundle

• ASUS CROSSHAIR III Formula motherboard
• LCD Poster
• 5 SATA Data Cables
• SupremeFX X-Fi audio card
• I/O Shield
• Driver CD
• CROSSHAIR III Formula User Guide
• Q-Connector
• IDE Cable
• 2-port USB and Firewire bracket

ASUS bundles their CROSSHAIR III Formula board in a red box. The front of the box has the name of the motherboard, the Republic Of Gamers logo, the ASUS logo, the CPUs supported by the motherboard and ATI CrossfireX support listed. The rear of the box has a list of the main features of the board including MemOK! CPU Level Up, 3DMark Advanced Edition and SupremeFX X-Fi. Also listed are the parameters of the board itself.

Opening the box we find ASUS has separated the board with two boxes inside the main box. The top box has the motherboard in an anti-static bag. The second box has all of the accessories including the manual, the cables the bracket, the driver CD. ASUS really went all out with the packaging to ensure safe delivery of the board with a little force being required to remove the boxes from the main box.

ASUS includes enough SATA cables to utilize all five of the SATA ports on the board. The external SATA port will require another cable if you use it, but five is more than enough. Also included is a 2-port USB 2.0/ 1 port Firewire bracket that brings the total on the board without additional purchase to eight and two respectively. The IDE cable is always welcome for when you want to use IDE drives.

Soundcard screenshots

The SupremeFX X-Fi card has six audio jacks for the audio of the motherboard, a SP/DIF In and an optical jack. This sound card is plugged into the first slot above PCI Express x16 slot number one. ASUS goes beyond the call of duty here as most motherboard manufacturers would install a Realtek ALC889 sound card and be done with it. The SupremeFX X-Fi card supports Creative Labs' EAX 3.0 and 4.0, making it a cut above the rest as the sound effects of newer Creative cards are not available with regular onboard audio on motherboards.

The LCD Post is a rather unique device. On boot-up, the device can go through the various steps of POST on the small LCD screen and end with a Welcome when the computer is up and running. You can set the LCD Post device to display the temperatures, the voltages or the fan speeds of the motherboard components when in operation. If you set the LCD screen to glow in the BIOS it will glow when in operation with the requested information.