P55 gets sexeh - ASUS Maximus III Formula

We've been playing around with Intel's latest Lynnfield chips and P55 chipset for a while now, and although we can't really talk about it indepth just yet, we're quite excited about it. Now Asus has just sent me through details of it's first P55 Republic of Gamer's board and it looks like a bit of a sexy beast.

It's not just a re-hash of the standard P55 boards, or even the last RoG boards we've seen - Asus' Maximus III Formula is coming out fighting with a few new little features.

RoG Connect is riffing on the idea of the extreme enthusiast desperate to squeeze the most performance possible out of their rig. You can feel like a proper technician by linking up a netbook/notebook to a spare USB port on your RoG mobo and accessing the hardware from afar. You can then tweak your rig at the hardware level, on the fly.

Granted it's not the sort of thing your average user is going to be doing overmuch, but it's a great way to look like you're an overclocking engineer...

The other really neat touch is the GameFirst feature. Getting past the tag-line of "The speed you need to pwn" it performs the same sort of function on the board as something like the dedicated Killer network card we derided as expensive hokum a little while back. GameFirst means that you can still be packing your upstream channel bandwidth with BitTorrent clients and still maintain low ping. It's also designed to keep downloads running smoothly while prioritising game-specific info. It's all done with wires, smoke and mirrors, or game profiles - I forget which...

The Maximus III Formula is also jam-packed with the usual high-end features we've come to expect from the RoG uber-boards and as such is likely to come with quite a price premium too. If you thought the P55 chipset was going to keep all the Socket 1156 mobos on the cheap side you can think again.