BIOS Interface

The BIOS implementation ASUS has integrated on the Crosshair III Formula should appeal to hardcore enthusiasts who are experienced OC’ers as well as the less experienced user who knows a little bit about the black art of OC’ing and would like to delve further.


Like all ROG motherboards, ASUS provides their Level Up feature for the newbies. Level Up is designed to take all the guesswork out of OC’ing for you, automatically overclocking your processor up to higher CPU speed grades with one click in BIOS. Say for instance you’d like to OC your Phenom II X4 920 or 925 processor. Level Up could be used to OC your CPU to 940 speeds with one simple keystroke. In the case of our 3.2GHz Phenom II X4 955 CPU, the Crosshair III Formula provides CPU Level Up options for 3.4GHz, 3.6GHz, and 3.8GHz.


Another feature ASUS provides in the Crosshair III BIOS is Extreme OV, with “OV” being short for overvoltage. This feature is an added safety precaution for newbies who see the plethora of voltage options available inside the Crosshiar III BIOS and have no clue what voltage to select. As any experienced user knows, pick a voltage too high, and you could fry your processor or memory. The Extreme OV setting provides the experienced users with the extreme voltages that they need to really push the Phenom II CPUs to speeds of 5GHz or more. Of course keep in mind that you’ll need to run liquid nitrogen or another ultra high-end cooling solution to keep your processor safe at these voltages.


With the OV feature enabled, CPU voltages up to 2.25V are available – normally the CPU voltage tops out at 1.75V in increments of 0.0125V. CPU loadline calibration is also available.

Let’s take a look at the rest of the BIOS options for tweaking:

ASUS Crosshair III Formula BIOS Features
HyperTransport Speeds	200-600MHz in 1MHz increments
PCI Express Speeds	100-150MHz in 1MHz increments
DDR3 Memory Speeds	800MHz, 1066MHz, 1333MHz, 1600MHz
HT Link Speed	200MHz-2600MHz in 200MHz increments
CPU North Bridge Speed	800MHz-6000MHz in 200MHz increments
CPU Clock Multipliers	8.0x-39.5x in 0.5X increments
CPU Voltages	0.8V-1.75V in increments of 0.0125V (up to 2.25V with Extreme OV enabled)
DDR3 Voltages	1.5105V-2.809V in 0.0135V increments
CPU VDDA Voltage	2.504V-3.2065V in 0.01325V increments
CPU/NB Voltage	0.8V-1.65V in 0.0125V increments
HyperTransport Voltage	1.20575V-1.802V in 0.01325V increments
NB Voltage	1.113V-2.00075V in 0.01325V increments
SB Voltage	1.20575V-1.4575V in 0.01325V increments

Like all ASUS BIOS implementations, all voltage settings are color coded, so you know when you’re pushing things too far. ASUS also provides the current voltage for each of the voltage settings as a point of reference as well.

Overclocking

It should be noted that beginning with the K10 CPU generation the motherboard itself has played less of a role when it comes to OC’ing, instead it has become increasingly important that you get a good chip that can scale well to high clock speeds. This continues to be the case for Phenom II; the latest motherboards are rarely the bottleneck. We highly recommend you also pick up a Black Edition processor whenever possible for maximum flexibility when OC’ing. The (very) general rule of thumb is to buy the fastest Black Edition you can afford.

With that being said, it wasn’t surprising that the Crosshair III Formula maxed out at 3.860GHz (19.0x203.2MHz). That’s a little bit higher than the OC we had with the same processor and the Gigabyte GA-MA790FXT-UD5P (3.826GHz), but ties the speed we hit with the M4A79T Deluxe exactly.