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.
The Box and Goodies -The Crosshair IV’s box resembles all of the other boxes in the ROG line. You have the red box and the starburst in the corner. Under this front facade is a small listing of features; the ones that Asus feels are the most important. These are things like the HydraLogix chip, ROG Connect, and USB BIOS flashback all of which are actually good features (and ones that we will cover in more detail later. Below this is a window area that affords us our first look at the Crosshair IV Extreme. From what we can see here, it is a good looking board (but we will talk about that more later).
The back of the box is actually a little boring. It has some of the same features that are listed under that front flap and also a system specs table. Inside the box Asus has given you a decent haul of goodies for you to make the most out of your Crosshair IV Extreme. Asus Includes voltage monitor cables (these plug into a row of headers on the board), a USB/ 1394 back bracket, a few thermistors, a Bluetooth module and more. Notice that there are not a whole lot of SLI/Crossfire bridges; this is because with the HydraLogix you do not have all of the x16 ports available to link up (again we will talk more about that later).
