MaximumPC 2008 11

I

t’s official: People who buy mother-

boards with mainstream chipsets such

as the P45 don’t want to pay for DDR3.

At least, that’s what it seems like to us.

Asus’s impressive Maximus II Formula is

the third P45-based board we’ve tested,

and not one of them sports DDR3 slots.

But that doesn’t take anything away from

the MIIF, the coolest P45 board we’ve

encountered.

With its subdued heatsink, mother-

board-based X-Fi support, and oversized

start and reset buttons, the Maximus II

Formula sports some slick features. It

performs quite ably too. MSI’s more garish

P45 Platinum outpaces the MIIF by a small

margin in some benchmarks, but the MIIF

led the MSI and a Gigabyte P45 board in

RAM speeds. So, we’ll call it a wash.

In hardware features, it’s close, but

we give the edge to the MIIF, with its eight

SATA ports and superior audio. We also

prefer its ADI-based codecs and drivers

over Realtek’s. We’ve been worried about

ADI soft ware support since the company

quit the PC audio business, but a spokes-

person told us that ADI is not quitting on

driver support (let’s hope). Plus, there’s the

MIIF’s X-Fi support, which produces more

satisfying gaming audio than Realtek’s

solution—despite the absence of promised

EAX4 support. Creative-licensed X-Fi driv-

ers supposedly enable EAX4 on boards that

don’t even use Creative hardware. That’s

cool, but we couldn’t get the EAX4 support

to work, and even the tools Creative gave

us said the feature wasn’t working.

Creative officials insist that it’s there,

but it’s not, at least not with the drivers

that come out of the box or the ones on

Asus’s website. If Creative and Asus are

true to their word, the feature will eventu-

ally pop up, making the audio experience

even better.

There’s a catch to all this goodness:

The MIIF has a $260 street price, while the

equally fast MSI P45 Platinum is about $75

less. But that extra $75 does get you a lot,

including an English-language POST LCD

box, X-Fi EAX4 support (hopefully), and

more SATA ports. It also gets you a heat-

sink that doesn’t look like a bad art-school

project. – G O R D O N M A H U N G

Asus Maximus II Formula

Nerds, start your engines!

A cool-looking start button

is one of nifty features you

get with Asus’s Maximus II

Formula.

84 | MAXIMUMPC | NOV 08 | http://www.maximumpc.com

VERDICT

$270, http://www.asus.com

9

Tons of SATA ports,

some X-Fi support,

an eye-pleasing color

scheme.

Pricey; we couldn’t

enable the EAX4

modes.

FRESCA

ASUS MAXIMUS II FORMULA

DIET DR. PEPPER

IN THE LAB^

REVIEWS OF THE LATEST HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE

PCMark06 Overall 8,315 8,756

PCMark06 RAM 5,826 5,737

3DMark06 Overall 12,442 12,735

ScienceMark 2.0 Overall 4,162 4,129

ScienceMark 2.0 Mem 7,048 7,112

Valve Particle test 85 88

UT3 (fps) 117 117

FEAR (fps) 215 245

Quake 4 (fps) 184.0 177

Best scores are bolded. Our test bed consists of a Core 2 Quad Q9300, 2GB of DDR2/1066 RAM, a GeForce 8800 GTX, and Windows XP Pro SP2.

BENCHMARKS

Asus Maximus MSI P45II Formula Platinum