The Most Powerful AMD 890FX Mobo?
While we're in the midst of reviewing a handful of AMD 890FX motherboards to go with your new Thuban-class processors, ASUS dropped us some photos to share of their top AMD 890FX motherboard in the works. As if the ASUS Crosshair IV Formula wasn't bad-ass enough, the even newer Crosshair IV Extreme motherboard (also part of the Republic Of Gamers series), topped the Formula with a Lucid Hyrdra 200 chip integrated onboard to enable multi-GPU configuration of either ATI or NVIDIA graphics cards - basically the holy grail of multi-GPU. Of course it's not a ball in the park as we've found out with MSI's Big Bang Fuzion motherboard earlier. However, drivers are steadily being churned out and we hope it has improved a good degree for ASUS to stake it out with this new Crosshair IV Extreme motherboard. There are other notable features too, but none that you might not already heard of. So we'll let the few pictures below do the talking. Enjoy and save up!
And there she is, the ASUS Crosshair IV Extreme AMD 890FX based motherboard without the cool heatsink covers on. Instead of quad PCIe x16 slots on the Formula, the Extreme goes for a total of 5!
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Here's the Lucid Hydra 200 chip that does all the magic of combining the horsepower of two distinctly different GPU vendors. This will of course be covered in a huge heatsink like that of the Formula motherboard.
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Almost all the SATA ports are in our preferred ideal positioning. Note also the dual hardware BIOS chips that are for redundancy purposes.
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Like the Formula class motherboard, besides the handy Power and Reset buttons, ASUS has two of its proprietary features here with Core Unlocker, which unlocks your AMD processor if it has cores disabled and the Turbo Key II auto-overclocking utility. Even cooler is the inclusion of individual control switches for the PCIx x16 slots functionality. And in front of that is ProbeIT, another of ASUS' ROG features which is basically a set of five voltage detection points for enthusiasts who prefer to use a multimeter to take readings.
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Here's the ROG Connect and RC Bluetooth allow you to control, monitor and tweak the main system from an external device. We've not found a very useful scenario with it yet, but it is another option if you're interested to venture.
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