Introduction:
Looking to build an ultimate gaming rig and need a motherboard with the latest chipset to handle over clocking and some high-end video card(s), than take a serious look at the Crosshair IV Formula from ASUS. The Crosshair IV Formula is the most features rich motherboard TechwareLabs has reviewed to date of this review. The Crosshair IV Formula includes the AMD 890FX chipset which includes some features which provide up to 4 ATI Radeon HD graphics cards with ATI CrossfireX and other features like SATA 6Gb/s and not to forget the over clocker’s play ground with AMD Overdrive software. The compilation of all the features packed into this board in one platform is brought to you by the Republic of Gamers (ROG).
To get understand what the Republic of gamers is all about, here is their creed taken from http://rog.asus.com:
| “The Republic of Gamers is committed to delivering the most innovative and best performing PC solutions to enhance the gaming experience of power users.” |
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“A History of the Republic of Gamers |
The inclusion of the AMD 890FX chipset in the Crosshair IV Formula is what sets this motherboard apart from other performance motherboards prior. The data transfer if from SATA 6Gb/s over your RAID and SSD drives or the massive amount of data transferred by the video cards which can be up to 4 cards, the Crosshair IV Formula has the architecture in place to handle it, and then some. Here is a brief chart on what the 890FX chipset is about, but if you want to know more, check out AMD’s page here.
Features and Specifications:
The features of the ASUS Crosshair IV Formula simply longer than any other motherboard TechwareLabs has ever listed to date. This list would take up several pages of this review to just list them all, so to spare your attention span, you can check out the features and specification for the ASUS Crosshair IV Formula on ASUS’s page here. So for those of you who want to see if the Crosshair IV Formula includes something you are specifically looking for, it very likely this board includes it.
The Crosshair IV Formula is the first motherboard that comes with a manual that is nearly 3/8 of an inch thick, which covers the features and capabilities of the board. The thickness of this manual while unpacking the motherboard was a little intimidating. So, if you’re a beginner when it comes to overclocking, don’t let the manual intimidate you, the Crosshair IV Formula is user friendly enough for the average beginner to get into overclocking, but if you are, a beginner, it would be best to stay away from the advanced features until you fully understand what that advanced feature can possibly damage if you adjust the setting too high. Of course, the Crosshair IV Formula has the advanced features for those of us who have been over clocking their systems for years. What set this Crosshair IV Formula motherboard apart from the competitors and other ASUS board prior is inclusion of such features the ROG have compiled and shoe horned into this board like ROG Connect and CPU Level Up. These two features are just scratching the surface of what this board can do, but overclocking your system can’t be any easier than with CPU Level Up which allows you to select from a list of CPU that you would like your system to run as the motherboard does the rest. When testing this feature be skeptics of such claims, the simplicity was just that, simple. The performance difference was noticed and benchmarked. The results were not huge, but there was a recorded positive increase in performance. Nice! ROG connect is a feature that the advanced overclocker’s really enjoy. ROG Connect is the “Plug and Overclock – Tweak it the hardcore way!” as the manual titles it. ROG Connect is explained as
| “Monitor the status of your desktop PC and tweak its parameters in real-time via a notebook –just like a rice care engine – with ROG connect. ROG connect links your main system to a notebook through a USB cable, allowing you to view real-time POST code and hardware status readouts on your notebook, as well as make on-the-fly parameter adjustments at a purely hardware level.” |
ROG Connect
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| We loaded the RC TweakIT software on our HP mini and connected the USB cable to the ROG port of the crosshair IV Formula board | Closer look at the RC TreakIT GUI. All these settings can be adjusted on the fly. |
ROG connect is very simple and addictive for those of us with time our hands tweaking for hours. Since you can make adjustments to the Crosshair IV Formula via your notebook/netbook, you are able continue to adjust the settings of your system to the ends of the envelope without the risk of losing your settings if the system goes into a failed state.
Closer look:
The Crosshair IV Formula came in a not so usual shipping box. The box which held the motherboard was designed to show off the board through a window which is revealed when you unclasp the one side of the box. This little extra give you the ability to take a real good look at the board before you purchase or un-box the board. This feature is actually saving you the possible grief of opening the board after you get it home to find out it is damaged during shipping etc. Also for the price you will pay for the board this gives you insight into what kind of quality of construction the board is.
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| The board displayed through a clear plastic window, which is on top of the box which contains the SATA cables, manual and q-Shield. | The extra bits included the q-shield, SATA cables ROG USB cable, manual, CrossFire Cable (jumper). 2-port USB 2.0 and 1-eSATA port. |
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| The Box was quite a display case which held the board to the bottom of the box and the high walls of the box protected the multiple heatsinks from damage during shipping. | The Crosshair IV Formula comes with four PCI Express 2.0 X 16 and two PCI slots which are CrossfireX capable. |
Closer Look Continued:
After unboxing the board we laid it out for a quick couple of profile shots.
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| The North bridge was quite impressive in size, and might be an issue for the LARGE heat sinks some users may try to attach to the board. | The South bridge came with a heat piped heat sink which was extremely large, but low-profile which is a welcomed design feature for thoughs who have shoe horned their graphics card onto motherboards which had a South-bridge fan to overcome. |
The heat sinks for boath the North and South bridge were very well engineered with the functionality in mind along with the inclusion of heat pipes to assist with keeping the chipset cooler.
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| Go Button – Press the Go Button before POST to enable MemOK! or press it to quickly load the preset profile for temporary overclocking when in the OS. | The I/O ports are very impressive to say the least. With the 7.1 audio, USB and Gigabit NIC as nothing new, the ports that were new to us included the Clear Cmos button, ROG connect port and switch and USB 3.0 |
The “Go Button” was quite handy when we were messing around with overclocking our system and trying different configurations. The other very handy feature included the Clear CMOS button on the back of the board on the I/O port ports
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| The bottom of the board usually isn’t much to look at, on your average board, but shown here the find the plate for mounting heavy heatsinks or potentially water cooling comes pre-mounted. Also the heat sink screws shown in the next photo actually have springs. | Close up shot of the springs and screws of the heat pipe and heat sinks which assist with the constant expanding and contracting of the chip set to prevent crushing the system board components. |
When it comes to the little extras in the design and how a compontent is put together gives you insight into the quality of the system.
Benchmarks:
SiSoft Sandra
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| The 1090T’s Cache Memory takes the title here against the Core i7 in both bandwidth and speed. | The 1090T wasn’t too far behind its rival in memory bandwidth benchmark. |
The handling of memory can be the deciding factor when it comes to performance over multiple cores. The going standard in today environment is to have at least one gigabyte of RAM per processor core; having anything less will likely leave the processor with a free clock cycle. This is well documented in the virtual server realm where virtual servers are trimmed down to the bare minimum processors and memory requirements. Now, we are not saying that the one must have six GB’s RAM for their AMD Phenom™ II X6 1090T day one, but it will sure wake up your system if you are pushing the system to the limits of processor. The ASUS Crosshair IV Formula board really begins to shine with 6 or more GB of ram installed.
Note: Users with Windows 7, 32bit operating systems will only be able to see and address maximum of 4GBs of RAM (Click here for specifics).
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Memory Latency |
Multi-Core Effeniciency |
The memory latency benchmark shows the latency is a real close across the board, but the speed factor on our test rig the speed factor is much further behind its competitors. This can be simply adjusted by the type of RAM that is installed in the system.
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| Power Management Efficiency Benchmark | Processor Arithmetic Benchmark |
The Power Management Efficiency benchmark is where the 1090T does very well, with the ALU Power Performance and Power Efficiency coming out ahead of the Intel Core i7 965, not to mention the dual cores from Intel and AMD alike. The point to be made here is with six cores the 1090T is more efficient per core than a dual core processors, so one would ask why buy a dual core? The Arithmetic benchmark shows us another close race between the Intel Core i7. The arithmetic benchmark is usually where the Intel Core i7 would leave the AMD Phenom™ II in the proverbial dust.
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Sisoft Multimedia benchmark |
The multimedia benchmark is another close one with Intel’s Core i7, though what the AMD 1090T lacked in Multi-Media Float benchmark, the 1090T made up for it and then some with the Multi-Media Int (megapixel/s). These kinds of tests stress the subsystem and motherboard components of the ASUS Crosshair IV Formula not to mention the bus.
Editor’s Note: As you can see the ASUS Crosshair IV Formula is more than capable of keeping up with the 1090T here resulting in what is probably the best gaming motherboard available for an AMD processor to date. Check out the gaming performance on the next page.
Benchmarks Continued:
Crysis Warhead:
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While playing the game Crysis Warhead, the frame rates did not drop below 34Fps. This is actually very reasonable considering the resolution of 1280X800 with 4X AA at optimal settings (gamer settings). It should be noted that video games, and especially Crysis, are much more video card dependent than CPU. As such unless the game is coded to take advantage of multiple cores beyond 4 you will not really see much speedup with the introduction of six core processors. We would expect that to change quickly as the gaming industry will want to start using all the processing power at their disposal.
3DMark06
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3DMark06 |
Though the score is primarily dependent on the video card, 3DMark06 does dedicate a portion of the score to the CPU and as such is included in testing. We should not that this is the first time this reviewer has ever seen higher than 2fps when the benchmark was running the CPU only segment of the 3DMark06.
ScienceMark2.0
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| ScienceMark 2.0 |
The ScienceMark 2.0 benchmark came back with a very impressive number in comparison to the AMD Phenom II 965 Black Edition Quad Core Processor score of 197155 shown here. Note: Though the test system is running with a x64Bit operating system like the 965 BE Quad Core review, the 1090T review is also running more RAM and also a solid state drive which will assist with this score.
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| The Windows 7 Base score of 6.7 |
The Windows 7 Base score can be useful to some users out there to assisting them with picking the software that will work the computer system and what software will likely be too demanding. We figured we would post our score showing that even with a solid state drive, 8GB of RAM and a six core processor; we only get a 7.5 out of 7.9 scale. Now we ended up with a 6.7 overall due to the graphics card, but we will attest that we have played several of the latest games which are very demanding when it comes to PC performance and what we experienced was nothing less than 7.8 across the board.
Conclusion:
Every so often a product comes to TechwareLabs that simply WOWs us with one or two neat features or concept that we proudly award the product the TechwareLabs Recommended, or Approved Hardware Award and on occasion, we award the Awesome Hardware Award. The ASUS Crosshair IV Formula is one of those products that have exceeded all expectations due to all the feature and capabilities of a motherboard. The Asus Crosshair IV Formula has so many capabilities and handy tools which makes overclocking simple/quick and easy. It was so easy that setting up our system for something insane like overclocking our AMD Phenom II X6 1090T to 4+ GHz with the ROG connect took only minutes. Then we were able to save those settings to the board and at a press of a button, we were able to go from stock to 4+GHz at a simple press of a button. So if you are looking for a motherboard with the right tools, to do it all and do it quickly and easily, you have got to get your hands on one a ASUS Crosshair IV Formula. TechwareLabs awards the ASUS Crosshair IV Formula the Awesome Hardware Award.
An awesome board with an amazing laundry list of features for ~$230. I need one!