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It's hard to believe that the AMD Phenom is almost 2 years old now and during this time we have only reviewed a couple of AM2+ motherboards that supported it. There are two good reasons for this. The first is that the demand for Phenom processors was miserably low at launch and probably didn't pick up until recent months.

The other reason is that the AM2+ platform has been around for what seems like forever and new motherboards offering something to talk about have been in short supply.

Roughly a year ago we reviewed the Asus Crosshair II Formula, based on the Nvidia nForce 780a SLI chipset. This board provided those who were brave enough to pick up a Phenom processor with a stable platform that sported a number of impressive features such as Triple-SLI. At the time we said the Crosshair II Formula was a well designed motherboard that was let down by a power hungry chipset and sub-par processors.

The reality was that the Phenom processors available at the time were no match for Intel’s Core 2 series. AMD managed to turn things around when they released the Phenom II X4 with models clocked at 2.8GHz and 3.0GHz.

Furthermore, now with the Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition processor in their arsenal, AMD is finally starting to look like they mean business. The Phenom II X4 955 has also helped to introduce the AM3 platform to market, giving them a true high-performance processor.

Now after much anticipation AMD has a processor that really deserves a quality high-end motherboard. The new Crosshair III Formula dumps the Nvidia chipset for the popular AMD 790FX and as a result drops SLI support for CrossFireX. This latest Asus motherboard comes stocked with just about everything in traditional ROG (Republic Of Gamers) fashion.