We managed to score some additional details and two more pictures of Asus' P55 based Maximus III Formula motherboard with a Republic of Gamers label. One of the things that left unexplained was the small button next to the USB port on the backplate as well as some other details.
As you can see from the picture and as it was shown before, the motherboard has a 19-phase design (16-phase CPU + 3 vtt). The motherboard also has three PCI-Express x16 slots, which can work in either single x16, or dual x8, while the third one is a 1.0 limited at x4. It also comes with two PCI-Express x1 and a single plain PCI slot.
Other features include ten SATA 3.0 ports, with two of them marked as a "Speeding HDD SATA" ports. Accoring to our info, these two are made for easy RAID setup, while two white ones don't support RAID.
The mystery button is an actual new feature that Asus likes to call ROG Connect, which gives this motherboard an external hardware-based overclocking control. It basically means that you can hook up your notebook/netbook or another PC via USB cable and display or adjust settings at a real time. Other features also include ProbeIt which are v-check points and Voltiminder LEDs.
The audio was also unknown and we managed to find out, as you can see from the picture below, that it will be done by SupremeFX X-Fi 8-channel add-in card with EAX 4.0 support. Other noted features include something that Asus calls GameFirst, which is basically an application that lets you control the priority of applications that are using Gigabit LAN.
We are sure that we will hear a lot more about this motherboard, and this might the one that you will look for once Intel's Core i5 comes to the market.
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Asus' Core i5 ROG motherboard pixellized
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