Terminal Thoughts

There'southward no question that the Asus Crosshair Four Extreme is a high quality motherboard. It'due south undoubtedly ane of the all-time, if not the all-time, AM3 motherboard nosotros have seen in terms of features and operation. Having said that, compared to Crosshair IV Formula, the "Extreme" version doesn't seem all that much more than extreme -- except maybe its price tag, which is ~25% college than the Formula'south.

When you compare both motherboards on paper, information technology becomes clear how fiddling they differ. Other than a few minor changes to components such as the Gigabit LAN controller, they are very much the aforementioned. The key add-on to the Crosshair Four Extreme is of grade the Lucid HydraLogix engine, and as much as we like the idea backside it, its drivers still need a lot of piece of work and we seriously question its worth at the moment.

If the technology worked every bit advertised, users wouldn't have to rely on AMD or Nvidia to implement multi-GPU back up for new games. Notwithstanding, folks would take to await for Lucid to update its drivers to support new graphics cards, drivers and games. Information technology'south a bit of a messy scenario and it's already caused us a number of headaches.

We saw next to no performance increase when mixing AMD and Nvidia graphics cards, and HydraLogix was considerably slower than CrossFire when using two Radeon Hd 5870 graphics cards. Furthermore, we weren't able to use any Radeon Hard disk drive 6800 series graphics cards. Unfortunately, we didn't feel the Extreme'south "SLI-like" functioning either, every bit we found no performance gains when adding a 2nd GeForce GTX 480 graphics carte, even though the HydraLogix control panel appeared to be working.

We ultimately showed you very little testing with the HydraLogix engine equally it was a bosom. While some games such equally Crysis showed small gains, most did not. Therefore, we did not desire to pigment the wrong picture by but showing the games that nosotros could get to work, if but to a certain degree. The bottom line is, in its current state, no gamer is going to want to use the HydraLogix engine. Menstruation.

We see very little sense in purchasing the Crosshair IV Farthermost. At $300 the Asus Crosshair Four Extreme is more than expensive than most Intel X58 motherboards, and for around $80 less the Formula would salvage y'all money that is amend spent on a more powerful graphics card. Alternatively, the Asus P6TD Deluxe supports both CrossFire and SLI natively without sacrificing whatsoever scaling performance and costs only $230, leaving headroom for a more than expensive Cadre i7 processor.

As well the HydraLogix engine's disappointing performance, we really liked the Asus Crosshair Iv Farthermost. In addition to including every single possible feature a motherboard could back up, its overclocking ability is second to none. Just as pointed out earlier, if you are seeking for the most farthermost AM3 motherboard possible, the Asus Crosshair Four Extreme undoubtedly fits the bill, just the Crosshair IV Formula is substantially the same with a far more sensible price tag.