ASUS Crosshair IV Extreme Review – Intro
Bluetooth 13 Feb 2011
Gamer’s board are usually high end boards because of the requirements. High bandwidth is necessary as a difference of 1 fps would be lethal in gaming. Of course, that not only involves the network, it also involves the graphics capability and support of multiple cards.
In the past, we see that AMD boards supports CrossFire X or SLI. The limitation is that you have to buy a pair, tri or quad to work. This seems to be limiting as you might have to give up your old card in favour of the higher performance. With ASUS Crosshair IV Extreme with Lucid Hydra technology, you can now run SLI, CrossFireX and most importantly mix and match AMD and NVIDIA cards and they do no need to be of the same model to speed up your graphical perforamnce. That definitely helps you to save some costs during upgrading process. It has 5 x PCIe 2.0 x16 (dual @ x16, triple @x16, quad@x16 x16 x8 x8) and 1 x PCI 2.2 slot.
So what does the board support ? The ASUS Crosshair IV Extreme supports the AMD Phenom™ II/Athlon™ II/ Sempron™ 100 Series Processors (AM3 CPU). This motherboard supports AMD® Socket AM3 multi-core processors with unique L3 cache and delivers better overclocking capabilities with less power consumption. It features dual-channel DDR3 1333 memory support and accelerates data transfer rate up to 5200MT/s via HyperTransport™ 3.0 based system bus. This motherboard also supports AMD® CPUs in the new 45nm manufacturing process. It has Core Unlocker to unlock the hidden cores of your Phenom processor. There is also USB 3.0 and SATA 6Gbps support on board.
AMD 890FX Chipset is designed to support up to 5.2GT/s HyperTransport™ 3.0 (HT 3.0) interface speed and dual PCI Express™ 2.0 x16 graphics. It is optimized with AMD latest AM3 and multi-core CPUs to provide excellent system performance and overclocking capabilities
On top of all these, it has RC Bluetooth. Just simply push the button from the Back I/O on the RC Bluetooth card, overclockers can real-time monitor the desktop PC system status & tweak its parameters – such as voltages and frequency on the fly. When users want to use ordinary bluetooth functions, just simply push the button once again & enjoy all the wireless convenience brought from RC Bluetooth.
Alternatively, Plug and Overclock – Tweak it the hardcore way! Monitor the status of your desktop PC and tweak its parameters in real-time via a notebook—just like a race car engineer—with ROG Connect. ROG Connect links your main system to a notebook through a USB cable, allowing you to view real-time POST code and hardware status readouts on your notebook, as well as make on-the-fly parameter adjustments at a purely hardware level.
ON board is the iROG, The iROG is a special IC which enables several ROG highlitghted functions that gives users full disposal of the motherboard at any stage! This design allows advanced user control and management to be processed purely at a hardware level. iROG greatly increases fun during overclocking for PC enthusiasts and it offers system maintainence and management with more control and efficiency
The board also supporst 2 BIOS with 2 BIOS settings. You can flash back to the old BIOS any time. The board also has Probelt, you can measure the voltage levels using a multimeter direct from the mainboard.
Other features include loadline calibration to maintain ample voltage for CPU during overclocking. The Voltminder LED also shows the voltage levels usnig different colours to ensure that you don’t overvolt the components (CPU,NB,SB,Memory).