ASUS Crosshair IV Extreme Pro Reviews

When we first reviewed the ASUS Crosshair IV Extreme, we had our reservations about the Hydra CrossLinX 3 due to the fact that we did not have the right cards to fully test its capability. Now, armed with two GTX 470s, we can test the SLI performance on the ASUS Crosshair IV Extreme via the Hydra chip. While we do not see performance increases across the board (even when the game does support multi-GPU setups), for the most part, the supported games do show 30-100% performance gain with the second card.

The Crosshair IV Extreme offers some of the best performance, overclocking, and general features of any 890FX-based motherboard available to date. It's overclocking and lower power consumption are features that may only appeal to certain audiences, but they're still packed in. The onboard audio is very good, the various BIOS protections make it all but impossible to hose the motherboard without using an axe, and it's currently one of just two motherboards that supports Nvidia multi-GPU configurations, even if the state of said support is rather shaky. Even with this caveat, it's the nicest AMD board we've seen in-house in quite some time.

There's no question that the Asus Crosshair IV Extreme is a high quality motherboard. It's undoubtedly one of the best, if not the best, AM3 motherboard we have seen in terms of features and performance. Having said that, compared to Crosshair IV Formula, the "Extreme" version doesn't seem all that much more extreme -- except maybe its price tag, which is ~25% higher than the Formula's. Besides the HydraLogix engine's disappointing performance, we really liked the Asus Crosshair IV Extreme. In addition to including every single possible feature a motherboard could support, its overclocking ability is second to none

Asus makes a pretty mean board, and by using the Hydra controller it is allowing multi-GPU with NVIDIA cards on the AMD platform to continue. Eventually the older NVIDIA 980 and 750 SLI chipsets will go away, and when that happens then it is unlikely that NVIDIA will grant AMD a SLI license for their chipsets. Asus and MSI are both investing a lot into Hydra, and with an entity the size of Asus on board, we can expect to see much better driver support and improved performance over the next several months. We have already seen Lucid increase its driver release rate in the past six months with all of the support (and pushing) they are likely getting from these large manufacturers. While it is certainly not a perfect technology, we have seen enough cases where it makes a positive impact to be well worth a second look when buying motherboards.

The Crosshair IV Extreme is a worthy addition to the RoG family of boards and although its price tag limits it to a niche market, it's worth taking a peek at if only to see what's possible in current motherboard design.

Compared to any of the other motherboards we've looked at carrying Lucid's HydraLogix 200 chip lately, Asus' Crosshair IV Extreme is packed to the gills with features both visible on the PCB and in the BIOS – as you would expect from a board carrying the RoG label.