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 Board  8-pin power  Rear of PCB  Solid Capacitors and PWM Starting on the upper left hand corner of the board we find that ASUS has included a 8-pin power connector. Many of the lesser priced boards on the market have 4-pin power connectors but ASUS has included the 8-pin variety on this board. To the right of the Power connector is a 4-pin PWRFan header. ASUS has put a heatsink over their main ROG chip with a heatpipe leading to another heatsink covering the MOSFETS.  CPU Socket  CPU Socket 2  ROG Heatsink  MOSFET heatsink The CPU area is relatively clear of obstacles allowing for large after-market CPU coolers to be installed on the Maximus III Formula. Two rows of low-profile capacitors surround the CPU Socket. One thing to note on the CPU Socket is the installation of the LGA-1156 CPU is slightly different than previous Intel CPUs. Lift the lever then the cover, insert the CPU making sure the notches align lower the lever below the screw, and install the CPU cooler.  24-pin power  Go button  Capacitors  CPUFan header The DIMM slots are located on the bottom right hand corner of the board. ASUS includes four DIMM Slots allowing for up to 4GB of DDR3-2133 (OC) memory to be installed. The memory controller is on the CPU, meaning that the Core i5 CPU will natively support DDR3-1333MHz. memory, but the board will support higher clocks with overclocking. The bottom edge of the board has five positions where you should position your multi-meter called ProbeIt.  24-pin power  Go button  Capacitors  CPUFan header On the bottom right area is the 24-pin power connector. To the left of that is a Go button. The Go button automatically overclocks the CPU when in Windows to a preset with the press of the button. There is a Go LED next to the button that blinks when MemOK is operating. Above that button is a Fan header. The CPUFan header is next to the DIMM Slots.  24-pin power  Go button  Capacitors  CPUFan header Storage on this board is rather interesting. The P55 Express chipset natively support six SATA ports which this board has in the sideways facing orientation. This prevents a long video card such as the HD 4870 X2 from ATI or the NVIDIA GeForce GTX295 from interfering with the SATA ports as some boards have a tendency to do. What’s interesting is on this board ASUS includes six further SATA ports, two next to the memory slots, two on the back I/O and two Speed HDD SATA ports on the left side of the board. A JMB322 controller offers hardware RAID using these ports. The other two ports are for ODDs.  Expansion  iROG 0829C  iROG 0918G  PEM Expansion on this board is dominated by the need to support SLI and or Crossfire. There are three full-length PCI Express slots on the board. The first two have enough distance on them to install two dual-slot cards like two HD 4870 x2s or two GTX295s. The third slot is designed for PCI Express x16 operation and can have another graphics card using the first generation PCI Express standard. The board also has two PCI Express x1 slots and two legacy PCI slots.  RTL8110C  USB headers  EPU2  Via chip Onboard sound on the motherboard is provided by a Supreme X-Fi add-in card that is installed in the first slot of the motherboard. This card offers support for Creative Lab’s EAX 4.0 effects, which is more advanced than the 2.0 effects supported by most other onboard audio solutions from Realtek. The Supreme X-Fi uses an ADI 2000b chip and is a self-contained add-in card. This card has all the audio jacks, freeing up space on the Rear I/O of the board.  FP I/O  Winbond  Firewire  Rear I/O The Rear I/O of the board does away with the legacy PS/2 and keyboard port. Frankly, this port issuperfluous in this day and age of 8 USB ports on a board means there’s little use for a PS/2 keyboard. The Formula III Maximus has 8 USB ports, a 9th USB port for the ROG Connect, a Clear CMOS button, a IEEE-1394 port, a RJ-45 jack for the onboard Gigabit LAN, and an external SATA port. The board supports up to 12 USB ports and 2 external SATA ports  Audio screenshots  Audio screenshots  Audio screenshots Contents:
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