Overall and Final Verdict
Now that I have taken an in depth look at the board and put it through our benchmarks what do I think? Well as usual I love the styling, the black and red theme that all ROG boards have is always great. The heatsinks are extremely heavy duty to the point where Asus had to use backplates on two of them to keep them secure. When it comes to features, they packed the board full, especially 4-pin PWM fan headers and also USB connections on the rear I/O. Performance was on par with the competition as expected. For software you get AI Suite 2, the older version of Asus’s software but you get most of the same features. I wasn’t able to completely cover the software due to issues with already having AI Suite 3 installed on our test bench, but you can check out a previous video that I made of the software.
So what are the downsides to the Corssfire V Formula-Z? Well for starters that name is far too long lol. Really I only had two issues though. When doing network testing I ran into the performance issues with our Trendnet TEG-S24Dg switch but none of our other switches. Beyond that my only complaint is that as great as this board is, you can tell it is a little dated. It is keeping up with the competition until you start comparing it to what Asus has to offer on all of the newer chipsets. I can’t fault them to much because like I said it is still a great board, but if they introduced a new 990FX board right now it would be even better!
At the end of the day if I were shopping for a replacement AM3+ board this would still be at the top of my list. That said, it is a lot more expensive than any of the other boards available as well, by something like $34. You do however get a few copy of Sniper Elite III if you pick it up on Newegg currently to help make that price premium hurt a little less.
