ASUS Maximus II Formula P45 Motherboard Review

Continuing with its impressive performance trends, the Maximus II Formula made a strong overclocking showing with both CPUs used. Overclocking with the board was done using a Corsair Nautilus 500 based water cooling unit, both an Intel E6300 CPU and an Intel Q9300 CPU, and 2 GB of Corsair DDR2-10000 ram modules. With the E6300 CPU, I was able to get the board to a cool 450MHz FSB, resulting in a 3.150GHz CPU running speed along with an impressive 1125MHz memory speed. Try as I might, the memory would not stabilize at any speeds over this using the E6300. I had even better luck with the Q9300 processor, taking the system up to a 475MHz FSB. This resulted in a CPU speed of 3.563GHz with an 1140MHz memory speed. As witnessed with the E6300 CPU, the memory would not stabilize at all above this speed.

Another day, another solid board from ASUS. The only thing that this board has going “against” it is that it does not fit the “value” segment, so we will see a bunch of guys in the forum whine like little girls about that, when there are in fact plenty of sub-$100 motherboards out there should they wish to buy one. That all said, a motherboard with features this deep for $270 is not exactly overpriced either.