ASUS Crosshair IV Formula AM3 890FX Motherboard Sneak Peak

A Much Closer Look at the Board

The area directly around the CPU socket may look a bit cluttered but illusion is mostly due to the necessary plastic AMD mounting hardware. Otherwise, the vast expanses between the socket and the components should make insulating for extreme cooling quite easy.

Travelling a bit further south, we see a quartet of 16x mechanical PCI-E slots which make use of the chipset’s 32 lanes to either work at 16x / 16x mode with two cards installed or 8 / 8 / 8 / 8 when four GPUs are popped onto the board. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like SLI will be supported at this point but that could very well change depending on NVIDIA’s licensing agreement with ASUS. Interestingly enough, there aren’t any PCI-E 1x slots.

Naturally, the Crosshair will feature all of ASUS’ new RoG features such as RoG connect (monitoring and overclocking capability through a secondary computer connected via USB) and GameFirst which is basically packet priority software for optimization of network traffic and tcp/ip performance. The bottom portion of board has a number of buttons as well which consists of the usual Reset and Power buttons as well as an auto overclock switch and a core unlocker button. The Core Unlocker should be of particular interest to many of you since it allows for the automatic unlocking of lower-end AMD chips. Since this popular feature was effective cut out of the 800-series chipsets, it is good to see ASUS making an effort to keep it alive as well.

The Creative-based SupremeFX chip makes a comeback as well but not in the usual add-in card way. Instead, ASUS has implemented this audio chip directly into the board itself, next to the PCI-E slots.

All in all, the Crosshair looks to be the one of the most feature rich AMD motherboards coming to the market in the next few months. And it will be at a price that may make Intel users wonder why the heck they are paying $300 and more for a nearly comparable product.