Designed for Water Cooling

Each ROG Maximus motherboard has an explicit product positioning and Formula is focusing on water cooling with no doubt. You can find the water block for the VRM section named as CrossChill EK III on the board. This motherboard is supposed to be a co-marketing product so I believe you’ll be very interested in if you’re a big fan of ASUS and EK® Water Blocks.

Photos of ASUS ROG Maximus XII Formula

Let’s take a close look at this board. And I’ll share my thoughts with you if I do have any ideas.

You can find lots of plastic films on the board and I used to just leave them there in the beginning in case of any scratches. And I’ll peal them off like 6 months later when the board is getting dusty.

It seems ASUS doesn’t want to waste any space on the rear IO panel. Except for the support for Thunderbolt, I can’t really think of any missing port on the panel.

Fan headers x 3 right next to the memory slots and the one which has different color is the CPU fan header.

2 more fan headers can be found next to the SATA ports.

2 more fan headers are found again.

The last 2 fan headers are found right next to the 1^st PCIe slot. Therefore in total, ASUS ROG Maximus XII Formula has 9 fan headers on the board. I believe this is good enough for most applications.

2 RGB headers can be found on the corner supporting traditional RGB (12V) and the latest ARGB (5V). Please allow me to remind you pins of these 5 headers are really sharp and dangerous. Don’t get your fingers hurt while installing.

There are 2 more RGB headers so there are 4 RGB headers in total, 2 for traditional RGB devices (12V) and 2 for ARGB devices (5V).

If you’re using open bench table as your chassis, Start button and Reset button really help a lot. And personally, I believe the Q-code LED is even more important. Without the Q-code LED, I have no idea what’s going on and what to do when I suffer issue like NO BOOT.

I got a question…… why the 8 pin power connector for the CPU has the metal enhancement but the other 4 pin power connector and this 24 pin power connector has no metal enhancement? Any ideas about that?

Unlike previous generations, 4 memory slots featuring the daisy-chain PCB layout design is the most popular way nowadays. T-topology PCB layout design has been the history.

There are 10 USB ports on the rear IO panel but if you still need more, there are 4 more external USB connectors on the board.

There is a massive metal shield on the back side of the board. Not only does it make the board look beautiful but it also protects the board against accidental damages. After all, there are still lots of tiny components on the back side of the board.

One more thing, you can install a M.2 SSD on the back side of the board. And it’s really nice that ASUS has printed a note indicating the supported type of SSD. As you can see in the photo, M.2 SATA SSD is not supported for example. By the way, this is the traditional Chinese concept that “X" means NO and “V" means yes if you can’t understand the note on the PCB. 🙂

Photo Gallery: M12F with Memory Installed