ASUS Maximus II Formula P45 Motherboard

 

Matching our previous reviews of P45 based motherboards, we used the same setup to guarantee a fair review.

 

 

During the testing of the setup above, special care was taken to ensure that the BIOS settings used matched whenever possible. A fresh install of Windows Vista was also used before the benchmarking began, with a full defrag of the hard drive once all the drivers and software were installed, preventing any possible performance issues due to leftover drivers from the previous motherboard installations. 

For the 3DMark and gaming tests, both single card and CrossfireX configurations were used for the purposes of testing the scaling of the P45’s 8×8 configuration.

To guarantee a broad range of results, the following benchmark utilities were used:

 

 

 

 

Much like the MSI Diamond that we reviewed previously, the wealth of options in the BIOS need to be tweaked to get the very best out of this motherboard. While moderate overclocks were easily gained through the AUTO options and Level up configurations, better overclocks were accomplished tweaking the Vcore/NB/VTT voltages. Time constraints prevented me from delving any further into the GTL settings in attempts to eek a little more out of the board unfortunately.