![]() Designed to provide the best clearance for long graphics cards, the six forward facing ports make installation into many chassis nearly impossible, since traditional designs have a hard drive cage in close proximity to the motherboard’s front edge. Users of true full towers might be a little aggravated, though oversized mid-tower users shouldn’t have a problem. Located on the front edge, just below the motherboard’s center line, the Ultra ATA connector is probably close enough to the top bays of most mid-tower cases to run a cable to the top external bay. The floppy is still needed by most people for adding AHCI or RAID drivers during Windows installation. Builders stuck with a bottom-mounted power supply will appreciate that the 8-pin connector is close enough to the top edge to pull a cable up from behind the motherboard tray, but any cable folded over the top would cover the latch.Īsus knows that many gamers prefer Windows XP, and puts its floppy header near the top to ease cable routing in typical tower designs. The Maximus II Formula puts its 8-pin and 24-pin power connectors along the top and front edges, which make for easy cable routing to a top-mounted power supply. Additional southbridge cooling could provide an excuse for this oversized part, but we know in truth it’s just for looks. The P45 Express doesn’t require additional components to do this however, as it natively supports dual graphics cards. The Maximus II Formula could be viewed as a replacement for the aging Blitz Formula, a motherboard that used its PCI Express hub to split its chipset’s sixteen graphics lanes across two slots in x8 mode. The huge ’sink is in fact a fake-out, made to make the Maximus II Formula fit in with several other ROG motherboards such as the Striker II Formula, Maximus Extreme, and Blitz Formula, all of which had required a PCI Express Hub to enable additional graphics card slots. The only components that reside beside the ICH10R southbridge are the third-party ATA controller, a few electronic switches for controlling PCI Express lane width (one can already be seen next to the ’sink), a few resistors, and transistors. In fact, it isn’t covering anything that needs a ’sink at all. No, it isn’t covering a PCI Express hub, especially not the rumored nForce 200. Now, before we begin piling compliments on the Striker II Formula’s good connector layout, we thought we should address one common misconception concerning the width of the southbridge ’sink. : Benchmark Results: Video Encoding And Synthetics.: P45D3 Platinum Software And Accessories.: P45 D3 Platinum BIOS And Overclocking.: P45 Platinum Software And Accessories.: Maximus II Formula Software And Accessories. ![]() : Maximus II Formula BIOS And Overclocking.: P45R2000-WiFi Software And Accessories.
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