Motherboards

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.

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.

So we have taken a look into how well the MSI Big Bang marshal was put together and now we are ready to put this board through its paces. We will be taking a look at this product from as many angles as we can to see if it is worth your money. Will all of the components that MSI threw together work well under stress? Well read on to find out.

The term Big Bang is used by many scientists to describe the moment of creation. They say that before this event the universe was a chaotic mass of gasses and unformed matter. The gravity and heat combined to compress this to a critical mass. At that critical point all of that gas and unformed matter exploded in all directions to form the basis or the universe we know. MSI’s Big Bang is a culmination of ideas, components and design choices that have, well not really exploded but, hit the market in a fairly big way. Before the launch of this line up MSI was having a rough time in the market. However, even then we saw the hints of big things on the horizon. MSI had partnered up with Lucid; they had begun tinkering with new components for their motherboards and their video cards. We have seen what they can do with the X58, P55 and even the 8xx chipsets from AMD. Now let’s take a look at what they do with the P67 chipset in their Big Bang Marshal.