ASUS Crosshair IV Formula - AMD 890FX - Socket AM3 - PCI-E 2.0 - DDR3 1600/1800/1866 - SATA 6Gb/s RAID - SupremeFX X-Fi Audio - CrossFire - ATX

For months now I've been on the lookout for a crossfire board and naturally I turned to what everyone calls the best. I looked up a few ASUS boards and prices, then looked up the online reviews of this particular piece of hardware and decided to put my money where my mouth is.

When it arrived it was well packaged with lots of "air bags" - literally, bags full of air - to prevent any damage(better than bubble wrap I guess)an I was eager to open it and get it going.

When you first open the front of the box(flip panel), it strikes you with all this colour and images on the reverse side, describing the main features of this and what sets it apart from the rest. Then moving down you see the board itself, handy for putting up on window shelves at PC shops, pretty useless for the average enthusiast as pretty packaging doesn't necessarily mean good performance.

This board comes with so many features to make overclocking easier it may actually make it boring for some of us(though I'm not that advanced yet). The first thing I did when I booted up was to try all the automatic overclocking features. You get software and hardware with both achieving a mild to moderate overclock(in simple terms, you can save a few quid on a CPU and still get higher level performance). My 965 was pushed to about 3.65 via BIOS and 3.78 via TurboV's auto tuning feature.

What I really liked about this board is the flexibility it provides people. Even if you don't know how to open your e-mail account, you can get a 150 to 500MHz OC out of this board. All stable and would probably run off the stock cooler(though I would advise against that)....

TurboV also comes with Turbo Unlocker, which will give you an automatic OC on AMD's Black Edition CPUs dependent upon workloads, all well within TDP and heat limits. It varies the OC to suit either a highly threaded application - mild OC on all cores, a two thread application - mild-moderate OC on two(or three)cores and a non-threaded application with up to 500MHz(advertised) boost for the single core. Now that's pretty good for an automatic OC feature that won't cause any cooling or stability issues.

The software also includes built in OC profiles, but they don't give a substantial increase.

A feature I liked was the mid way point (or simple OC) where one would set the most basic of parameters and the board would do the rest. I like it because it takes the guess work out of the equation for novice overclockers and will provide stability with mild to moderate OCs, which is a good learning base.

And all the way to the other end, this board has enthusiast and extreme settings I never knew existed, most of which are accessible through TurboV as well as the BIOS. As I said, great flexibility!!!

If you go into BIOS, it will show the Extreme Tweak page first. That has all the settings you'll need to get your CPU to the top of its potential. It even includes RAM OC profiles. That's intended for people like me who went all out and bought a set of Corsair Dominator GT and want to run it at its full potential. Personally I have a set of 6GB at 1866(9-9-9-24) and the maximum native support of the board is 1600. All I had to do is select the D.O.C.P. setting and then the 1866 profile and voila - stable at 1866 with the 965 at 3.39. If you have a 2000MHz set - it will run it at 2000.

All I did after was increase the CPU multiplier a bit and I'm now running 3.844 stable at 40*C idle and 57*C max load. Will chase after the 4GHz mark soon. It just makes things so easy with all the automatic V regulation settings. And I haven't even scraped the full potential of this board yet!

I know other people have bumped up ALL voltage settings by quite a bit and are running 4.2 - 4.5 stable on water, but I doubt my V8 will cope with the amount of heat the 965 will dump on it.

With all the software to run the features, ASUS thought of the purists as well. The bunch that won't bother installing all the diagnostic software, because it's too inaccurate for them. For this purpose they have ProbeIt tabs on the board. You can touch your multimeter to one of those and it will give the most accurate voltage reading, meaning you no longer need to rely on software that may be showing higher or lower than true values. I've yet to test this as I've yet to push the board hard enough to need to test it.

On the cooling side, ASUS have included a total of 8 fan headers. All PWM, all fully adjustable. They can be used as follows:
CPU, CHA1, CHA2, CHA3 - ran off the CPU temperature. Fan profiles included, but manual profiles can be set. Caution - fan profile max temps are set to 70*C and some AMD CPUs have a threshold of 62!!!!!
PWR, OPT1, OPT2, OPT3 - ran at duty cycle setting between 40 and 90%
All - ran at full speed
OPT1, OPT2, OPT3 - ran on individual temperature sensors with the max sensor temp value set separately per fan(sensor sold separately)
If all are ran at full speed, it may be possible to adjust them using software.

All fan headers are also DC friendly and have the capability to adjust the speed of DC fans, meaning you don't have to go and buy a separate controller or a whole new set of PWM fans for your case in order to have them adjusted.

I've also noticed that this board doesn't run the fans on 100% at ANY load as that is not necessary, therefore saving energy and money.

The EPU program that comes with this board also has three modes of operation:
Auto - system settings are adjusted relative to system load
Maximum Performance - fans are ran at BIOS profiles, no performance downgrade at any time
Max. Power Saving - fans are switched off, CPU multiplier is brought down to minimum as is CPU VCore, HDDs are switched off when not needed(in general valid for all profiles, but idle time before switch off is varied and can be adjusted via the settings menu)

Auto and Max. Power Saving also provide the option to undervolt the CPU. This will reduce both power usage and CPU temps, but use with caution, as it will destabilize the system if used wrong.

Installing this board, I noticed a rather simplified design and a lack of a component I was so used to. It didn't have an IDE connection. This made installing windows(as I couldn't transfer my RAID0 over) a rather tricky job, because my DVD drive ran on IDE. I did however manage to put the windows installation on a pen drive and that proved to be much quicker than the DVD install I was so used to.

This board comes with all the standard ROG features, like GameFirst, ROG Connect, etc(If you look up this board on ASUS' web site, you will find all the info you need).
It also comes with Mem-OK, meaning it will get ANY ram going(again enthusiast features - super low latency stuff may fail if configured incorrectly, but this will run it safe until set manually)

I've noticed that since I've used this board, I've lost any microstutter I used to get whilst gaming and I believe that's due to the 1866RAM I'm running. I've also improved my benchmark scores by quite a bit.

Looking up the spec on this board, I've noticed an increase in graphics performance over the previous best. This board sports 42 PCIE lanes, 10 of which reserved for SATA III(6 ports x 6Gb/s) and USB 3.0 support(Using an NEC interface chip) as well as the SupremeFX X-Fi audio(Courtesy of Creative Labs).

This config lets you use either 2 slots at x16, one at x16 and two at x8 or all 4 at x8.

It should be mentioned that the only official multi GPU support is for CrossFire X. I will put great emphasis on "OFFICIAL" as this doesn't mean that it won't run SLI. I've managed to get two nV cards to run SLI on mine(using SLI Patch v0.9) and they scaled just as good as they did on an X58 and nForce 980. The only problem would be the SLI Bridge as it is not provided with this motherboard. I did however find some 3 way ASUS ones on the web, so all is not lost. I will however also emphasise that this is unofficial and there are no guarantees. No support is provided by ASUS as nVidia won't grant the 890FX SLI rights and this being an ASUS 890FX board would put ASUS in violation of that. Bottom line, don't buy specifically to run SLI! If that's what you're after, get the Extreme version as the Lucid Hydra will add support for SLI.

Overall this is one of the best boards available and certainly a big hit on Intel's X58 in terms of Crossfire support, and with the new 1090T reaching the levels of the i7 930 both stock and OC, AMD are starting to weigh their own in the game.

This board is a bit on the pricey side, but you do get what you pay for.

Bottom line - GET ONE!!!!! Read more ›

A very stable, very accomplished motherboard, with so many O/C options and features you'll be hard pressed to find a better feature-rich stable motherboard. eSATA and USB3 work billiantly; I was shocked how fast you can transfer gigabytes of data to an eSATA enclosure (70MB/s with an old(!) SATA1 hdd for example). The BIOS can be a little daunting, but very little needs to be fiddled with if you are unsure - the auto settings allow for a very stable system, if not optimized. The component choice on the motherboard is impressive; if you check out the power phase design for example, you'll see why compared to normal motherboards. Although I at first had some reservations over memory compatibility for this motherboard, if you stick to the QVL (qualified vendor list) for memory from Asus, memory isn't an issue. Northbridge heatsink issues for some batches of this motherboard have been reported (some standoffs being too tall allowing no contact with the NB heatsink); my NB does run warmer than the other components (5*C more than the SB), but it seems acceptable at load, and causes no stability issue - later models should have the issue fixed anyway. Works out of the box (no BIOS update required) with an 1100T processor.

Once again ASUS prove to be at the very top of their game with this hardware, and I have no problem suggesting this to anyone who wants *the best* AMD board their computer can have.

As a PC Enthusiast I love this! This product encourages you to play around with your computer! Teasing really... This is really worth getting. Especially with Sata 3 Hard drives getting cheaper and AMD releasing top notch Processors at great prices how can you not! Asus, I thank you... :D

If your an AMD gamer then this is defo the daddy of them all. It even overclcoks your cpu well for you if you let it.good for any crossfire setups as it allows you to have two full x16 pci-e lanes for graphics goodness. The built in soundcard isnt much improvement over realtek onboard but that doesnt matter anyway as you can buy xfi-extreme music cards for [] quid new on ebay. got mine hooked up to - phenom 2 x4 3.8ghz (OC) , 8gb ram ddr3 , xfi xtreme music s-c , antec 902 case , ati 5870 , lg dvd re-writer & samsung f3 hdd 1tb. Goes like a greased slug down a slide oh yeah !!!

this board is outstanding its about 23 degrees and it supports a gtx 580 16gb of dominator gt ram 1866 mhz and 1200w power supply whit noctua cpu cooler and 7 fans all i can say this is brilliant and has a nice bios to :D

Honestly, this motherboard is a god send

Ok ok, I'll be honest, the colours won me over from the start, goes with my black NZXT phantom a treat :)

got this board with the logical AMD 1090t, also got some corsair vengeance 2x4gb sticks 1600mhz 9-9-9-24, worked straight away (did have to up the mhz from 1333 to 1600 in the Bios)

I originally had 4gb of Dominator 9-9-9-24 1.8v 1600, but unfortunately due to the voltage it kept causing blue screens.

One of the great featues of this motherboard is the error lighting, it'll tell you which hardware component is causing the problems, took me 2 seconds to locate an issue with the memory modules. It was my fault, I hadn't put them in properly!

For crossfire you've got a nice gap between the 2 x16 slots, so plenty of room to breath. The onboard sound works a treat with my AX720's with an optical cable port. The 6gbps sata ports are a very nice feature, it means you can really get the most out of your solid state drives.

The layout of the board is fantastic for anyone with a good cable management case. Ample fan connectors, the NZXT phantom comes with a fan controller, but I have the second fan for my Hyper 212+ and there's a very handy fan plugin for it to keep your case tidy.

Overclocking is a pleasure on this board, haven't used the ROG feature yet but it looks nice. But the bios layout is great, very user friendly if you know what you're looking at.

One slight problem! I currently have a hyper 212+ and I'd struggle to fit a second ram set in, I think I probably could but it'd be a squeeze.