What do you do to improve on an already perfect motherboard design? The answer: add more stuff.
When ASUS released the Crosshair IV Formula (the little brother of the Crosshair IV Extreme) enthusiasts rejoiced: a board that not only looked beautiful, but had all the features and performance to match. What could ASUS possibly do to improve the Formula? It has been setting records galore, already has support for 3-way CrossFire graphics and is un-peered in overclocking. Add more stuff, that’s what!
Taking a look over the board we found one PCI slot and 5 PCI-Express slots capable of supporting a native 4-way graphics configuration. There are also 10 onboard SATA ports and an array of onboard switches, including switches to turn each PCI-Express slot off. ASUS has revised the heatsink for this board to handle the increased heat load of additional onboard features. This board might not suit all users though; it comes in the massive E-ATX form factor to accommodate 4 graphics cards. The power circuitry has also been enhanced on the Extreme, more than capable of providing ample power to the latest range of 6-core AMD CPUs.
In a very innovative move, ASUS has introduced the much-hyped Lucid Hydra chip onto the Extreme. The Hydra chip brings multiple graphics card acceleration to motherboards in the form of a hardware microchip, as opposed to the traditional software-based configurations. Moving to a hardware-based solution not only bypasses the restrictions that vendors impose, such as which GPUs can be put in multi-card configuration, but promises the possibility of improved performance. In the case of the Extreme, it also brings NVIDIA’s SLI configuration to an AMD motherboard, something that is not available natively within the current AMD chipsets.
Hydra sounds great in theory, but how does it perform? The results are mixed. We compared a Hydra-based multi-card setup against a traditional driver-based setup with 3 ATI 5870 graphics cards. We found that in benchmarks such as 3DMark Vantage we had significant gains in our scores, but in Crysis and Heaven, Hydra had a negative performance impact. We were also disappointed to find out there is currently no support for 4-way setups in Hydra. Lucid has assured us that the Hydra driver updates in the future will have much better gaming performance and also support 4-way configurations.
When we put the Extreme on our test bed we found it packed all the performance punch that the Formula does and more. In fact, in a direct comparison of the two boards, the Extreme possessed much higher memory bandwidth, which helped it dominate memory and CPU-based benchmarks. When we started to overclock the Extreme it kept up with the Formula every step of the way and it was nearly impossible to separate the two. We were worried the Hydra chip may have some negative performance on games and benchmarks even when it was in a disabled state, but there seemed to be no difference in 3D performance between the Formula and the Extreme.
There are a number of features on the Extreme that are over the top for most users, such as the PCI Express on/off switches which give the user the ability to turn off graphics cards without removing them from the motherboard. Features like this and the strengthened power delivery are definitely targeted at overclockers and it is questionable if 99% of users would ever require these capabilities. We would recommend most users keep the extra $80 dollar difference in their wallet and go for the ever so slightly less high-end Formula instead. That being said, if you want the most amazing AM3 experience and performance possible then there is only one option: the ASUS Crosshair 4 Extreme.
Available from ASUS, retailing for $499.APC rating: 9/10 (Editor's Choice)