Asus has a flare for design and for choosing the right parts to go on their products. Over the years of working with them I have often had them tell me “wait for our design” instead of tinkering with the reference parts. The benefit of this is that the consumer usually gets a much better product in the end and we see the upper potential of a GPU, CPU or Chipset. We have walked you through the layout and design of the Asus Crosshair IV, now we are going to show you how well it performs.
Value -Value is another very subjective topic. What is expensive to some might be a deal to others. You can look at this topic in multiple ways. One is raw price and the other is what you get for the money. Each is accurate and both are correct ways to look at price/value. We tend to look at features, performance and real-property when we discuss value. However, we also take into account the raw cash cost of the item.At $299 the Crosshair IV Extreme is an expensive board. In this price range you are going to expect a ton of performance and have a right to get it. On the one hand the Crosshair IV has the right stuff to equal this price in terms of sheer features and components. The problem that we have is that it falls a little short on the performance side of things when we compare this across both houses (Intel and AMD). If you compare AMD to AMD then the Asus Crosshair IV Extreme is a great value and does have the performance to match up to that price. You can also consider that the 1100T costs significantly less than the Intel CPU (2600k) we used which can offset the cost of the Crosshair. Conclusion -The Asus Crosshair IV Extreme is a bold product. Although not the first to market with a HydraLogix setup; Asus did take the time to really plan out what they wanted to offer. In the end we feel that they have done what they set out to. You are getting an AMD motherboard that stand out in front of most of the other boards based on the same chipset. Asus has also given you great flexibility with the Crosshair for tweaking and overclocking. Although we have not had much success in pushing any of the Phenom II X4 or x6 CPUs we have to high clock speeds the Asus Crosshair IV was able to help us get to our highest to date. If you own an AMD CPU then we can recommend the Crosshair IV as an upgrade for almost any 8xx series motherboard out there.You can discuss this in our forum
