When you hear the term Crosshair several things come to mind. The first is probably the two lines that intersect inside the optics on a targeting scope (which were originally real hairs). The next could be the options in most of your first person shooter games. If you are an AMD enthusiast you might think of Asus’ Crosshair line of motherboards for AMD CPUs. It is this last one that we are going to dive into and talk to you about today. The Crosshair line is fittingly named, as it relates to accuracy, and performance. Asus has worked hard to make sure these boards represent the highest level of performance for AMD CPUs. Although not the most current available we are taking a look at the Hydralogix enabled Crosshair IV Extreme. This is a $299 890FX based board with Lucid’s Hydralogix multi-GPU technology hanging out on the board. We are going to look at its design and features today and will follow this up some single GPU performance testing shortly.
Page 5 of 5
Conclusion Part I -
It is no secret that I like the way the Asus R&D engineers think. Their designs and component choices are often odd but usually work out very well in terms of performance and also efficiency. This is the third Extreme board we have testes in the newer ROG line up and are as impressed with this one as we have been with the X58 and P55 offerings (and we have a P67 one in the lab as well). Of course the proof is in the pudding, as they say. Still we have to wonder just what we will get from this board if once we push it and if there is any benefit to the way that Asus implemented the HydraLogix chip over some of the other manufacturers out there. If you are interested in finding out; check back in a few days when we finish up our performance testing. For now things are looking good for this $300 890FX board from Asus.
Discuss this in our Forum