![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Thursday , October 29, 2009
- Author:
- Daniel Dobrowolski
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
ASUS Crosshair III Formula Motherboard Review
ASUS releases yet another Republic of Gamers motherboard, this time for our AMD users. The Crosshair III Formula is the latest incarnation of the ROG series which means that it comes from excellent pedigree. The Crosshair III Formula has some big shoes to fill. Is the Crosshair III AMD 790FX chipset motherboard is up to the challenge?
Multimedia Benchmarks
Outside of gaming and encoding, there are few applications on the desktop that will push our systems to their limits. Especially when we start talking about dual core processors that are becoming the norm now days. Some encoding apps are really starting to shine and become usable by the masses.
The benchmarks below all represent very real world situations just like you would run into at home while encoding video from your camcorder - or while using a picture editing program - or while encoding music for your iPod - or making movies with something as simple as Windows Movie Maker - or encoding a DVD for saving it to your hard drive to allow you easier access to the content.
We have simply timed our various tests on the different systems and supplied you with the amount of time it took for the system to fully build the file. Scratch disks were used properly as well as making sure we were not bumping into any IO bottlenecks elsewhere.
Graphs are labeled as follows: Motherboard - CPU Clock - FSB Clock - Memory Clock
DivX Converter 6.6.1 Pro Codec 6.8.4
DivX performance was less than outstanding. The downfall of this test is that it rounds off to the minute Going in and checking by hand, we did see that there was less than 10 seconds difference between our AMD systems, but the rounding impacted it much differently.
Lame 3.98.1
Performance in Lame was again exactly where I expected it to be. Right in line with similar test configurations.
WinRAR v3.80
More of the same in the WinRAR test.
TMPGEnc 4.0 Xpress v4.6.2.266
Our ASUS board shows a small advantage over the GD70 in this round.
Videora IPod Converter
Again we see acceptable numbers for our AMD comparison.