14 DAY TRIAL // Like most of the other motherboard makers, ASUS wasted no time announcing its latest series of motherboards, specifically designed to support Intel's much-anticipated Lynnfield processors. On that note, the company officially informed about the launch of two new ROG-series mobos, the Maximus III Formula and the Maximus III Gene. Both boards have been designed to take advantage of Intel's latest P55 chipset, providing users with support for the new socket LGA 1156-compatible processors.
Designed for overclocking enthusiasts, as well as for gamers that are looking to upgrade to the latest technologies offered by Intel, the new motherboards have been created with a number of features that will enable users to take full advantage of the performance capabilities of the latest Core i5 and Core i7 processors. The main difference between the two boards is that the first, the ROG Maximus III Formula, comes in a Full-ATX form factor, while the second, the ROG Maximus III Gene, offers support for Intel's socket LGA 1156-compatible processors, in an mATX form factor.
Kicking off with the smaller, HTPC-ready mATX Maximus III Gene, ASUS has designed a board that can support up to 16GB of dual-channel DDR3 memory, coupled with two PCI-Express 2.0 x16 slots, offering support for both NVIDIA SLI and ATI CrossFireX multi-GPU technologies. The board comes with a built-in, 8-channel SupremeFX X-Fi audio card, two 1394a ports (one in the back panel and one onboard), 14 USB 2.0 ports, one PS/2, one eSATA, a Clr CMOS button, one Optical S/PDIF and one ROG connect On/Off switch.
The ATX Maximus III Formula is pretty similar to its mATX counterpart, but comes bundled with a discrete, SupremeFX X-Fi 8-channel audio card, three PCI-Express x16 slots, with CrossFireX and SLI support, and the same connectivity options as on the Maximus III Gene. The ATX board offers ten SATA 3.0GB/s storage ports, compared with the seven available on the aforementioned board.
Both products come with support for a number of system fans (five on the Maximus III Gene, eight on the Maximus III Formula) and are bundled with the Kaspersky Anti-Virus software. Unfortunately, there's no word on pricing and availability at this time.