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.
Features -In the current market motherboard (and indeed almost all components) performance is very close. The days of a large performance advantage between boards using the same chipset are long gone. That is unless someone makes a HUGE mistake (like runs traces completely wrong). Now, the thing that differentiates different products is the features. These are things like power management, extra slots, better audio CODECs etc. It is these items that R&D teams work so hard to drop into what are really identical pieces of hardware at their most basic level.Over the years we have had multiple conversations with Asus and they have always talked about their commitment to pushing the level of features available on their boards. This is why we see such a large feature set on their upper end boards. It allows them to maintain a good level of feature selection even for the mid-range and lower products. The Crosshair IV Extreme has more than its share of features. Excellent -HydraLogixMix and Match GPUsIntel LANFPCAPsROG ConnectSix Native SATA 3.0 portsThese are all excellent options for any motherboard. It is what we would expect from the flagship motherboard for the AMD CPUs.In the middle (sort of good) -Dual BIOSVoltage Monitor PointsMultiple 4-pin Fan headersGo ButtonCrossfireXiROGBluetoothAI Suite IIMany of our mid-range features are still better than some of the top end ones on other boards, however since Asus is now spreading these out to their mid-range products it takes away from their top-end appeal.Floor Mats -Q-ConnectorsQ-FAN Board LEDsCore UnlockerAlthough the list is small these really are rather plain features when compared to the others that you get with the Crosshair IV. After all if you picked up this board for the HydraLogix, you area probably not thinking “hey cool I get little connectors for the front panel header!”. I am sure you find them nice, but it is not your big motivator. We will cover some of these features more in their proper places but for now you can see the listing of what we see as real and what is filler or brand wide.
