The ASUS Crosshair V Formula is a part of the ROG line so that entails it carries the colours of the ROG branding too. The black PCB with black and red slots is a rather eye catching colour scheme. The heatsinks match this colour scheme too. Whilst ASUS are not the only manufacturer to implement the black and red colours as EVGA are known for this too.
The voltage delivery for your CPU is taken care of by an 8+2 power design. The 8-pin EPS/CPU power is located in the top left corner of the motherboard, above and to the side of the heatsinks. There is an additional 4pin CPU power to the right of the top VRM heatsinks if you are overclocking to extreme levels and you want to feed your CPU more power.
It should be noted that that our Noctua NH-D14s heatpipes do come into contact with the heatsink on the Northbridge but it is literally only just touching. The NH-D14 is one of the biggest air coolers out there on the market today so you should not have any issues with other coolers.
There is a myriad of features around the DIMM slots. Four PWM fan headers are available for use (one is for the CPU FAN) and directly above the slots are voltage read points for the various components in your system. They include the CPU, CPU VDDA, DRAM, NB, HT, SB and CPUNB voltages as well as two ground points. The USB 3.0 header is located to the bottom right-hand-side of the RAM slots. The RAM features a two phase design for its power delivery. Finally, we have the ASUS GO button. This is something which you can use to define an overclock within the BIOS to load when you enter your OS. This may be useful for those who use this board for extreme overclocking. It allows you to boot at lower, more stable speeds and then it gives you that speed boost when you need it for the all important screenshot moment.
There are seven internal SATA 6Gbps ports on this motherboard. Six of them are controlled by the chipset, and the other two are controlled by the ASMedia ASM1061 controller. The six ports controlled via the chipset are all RAID capable and they allow you to use either RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10. The ASMedia controller takes care of the one extra internal port as well as the eSATA port at the back.
Out of the four PCIe x16 lanes, three of them can be used for either a dual or triple GPU setup. The fourth PCIe x16 lane is limited to x4. With the way that the slots are put on the motherboard, it is not possible to have any additional cards with a triple card configuration. There is only one PCIe x1 slot which is covered when you use a GPU in the primary slot that is features a dual slot cooler, which is pretty much every card today.
Below the PCIe lanes, we have three buttons which are consist of the OC, START and RESET buttons. They do exactly what they say. Pressing the OC button will give your system an automated overclock. Pressing the START button will turn your system on as if you pressed the power button at the front of your case and the RESET button is the same story. There are the usual USB 2.0 headers located around the bottom of the board as well as two PWM fan headers and
On the back of the board, we have a vast number of connections available. Starting from left and working our way towards the right, we have a PS2 port and two USB 3.0 ports. We then have a Clear CMOS button which makes it easier for you to clear your CMOS if you have already installed your motherboard into a case. Two USB 2.0 ports and the eSATA 6Gbps port are next in line, followed by an optical S/PDIF port and another two USB 3.0 ports. The LAN port, which is controlled by an Intel controller, is next in line with another six USB 2.0 ports. One of which, the white one to be more specific, is used for ROG Connect but it performs as a normal USB 2.0 port if it is not connected for ROG Connect. Last of all, we have the six audio ports which are powered by the Supreme-FX X-Fi sound card.
