ASUS Crosshair IV Extreme Crossfire Gaming Motherboard Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
1,873 words · ~9 min read
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Yes, many requests for this one. Many, many requests. This is the Crosshair 4
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Extreme and it contains all of the latest technologies. In fact, some that
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have been around for a while but just took well a lot of months to actually be
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implemented on anything. This has the Hydrolologics engine by Lucid. So what
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that means is that you have support for
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not only ATI Crossfire X but also
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multi-GPU support for mix and match here
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up here. So cross links 3 technology mix and match vendors and cards and whatever
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else you could possibly want to mix and match for graphics cards. So experience
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true graphics freedom. You can run two Radeon cards. You can run two GeForce
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cards. You can run a GeForce and a Radeon. You can run mismatched GeForce
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cards or match GeForce cards. It doesn't matter. It's not an SLI ready
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motherboard. Please note the absence of an SLI logo. This is an AMD board with
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an AMD 890 FX chipset, but you can still
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run two GeForce cards thanks to the Hydrolologics chipset right there from
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Lucid. Okay, it's a Republic of Gamers board, so you've got ROG connect, so you
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can plug in another computer and you can make any changes to the system settings
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that you could want to. It has USB BIOS flashback. That would be really nice,
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actually. That's a cool feature. So, you just throw a USB with the BIOS on it,
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you plug it into the back, and you boot up and it restores it. Very cool. You've
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got uh Oh, yeah. I believe that one is so that you can use Bluetooth to
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overclock through your phone or something like that. So, that's a pretty neat feature if you're into that. And 3D
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Mark Vantage Advanced Edition is included. Let's have a look at the back
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of the box and see what they have to say. It's all of the exact same stuff.
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Wow. Okay. Five PCIe 16X slots. Now,
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we're going to have to have a look at the manual for a change. I know. I don't
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think I've ever actually shown you the manual for a motherboard during an
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unboxing, but we're going to have to do that to find out exactly how the
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Hydrolologics engine splits up those PCI
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Express lanes because it actually acts as um as an intermediary between the
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chipset and the graphics cards and that's how it performs its magic where
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it takes two mismatched cards and and takes the performance of them and adds
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them together and makes more performance. So, let's have a look at the accessories. First, we have
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What on earth is this? We'll be back in a moment. This is a Bluetooth riser
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card. I got it figured out. We have a USB cable for ROG Connect. We've got an
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IO shield, which is black and looks cool. We have some temperature probes.
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Very nice. We have some cable ties. We
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have a Q connectors. We have a Crossfire bridge.
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We have voltage readout little plugs and you plug those into the
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board and then you plug your multimeter into there and you can read the voltages of a bunch of various aspects of the
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board. We have a FireWire USB IO PCI
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back plate. We have one, two, three bags
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of two. So that's a total of six SATA 3 cables. And then we have two SATA 2
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cables. Please note those cables are identical other than the color.
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We have a Crosshair for four extreme motherboard DVD which you should throw
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away and download the latest from the ASUS website. And we have labels for
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your SATA cables as well as the manual. So give me a moment. I'm going to look
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this up and I'll be as you can see this is a very complicated chart. And hold
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on, cameraman, don't move the camera. Uh look at this paragraph so that if people
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want to, they can freeze the video and read it. Don't move. Don't move. Don't
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zoom. Steady hands. Steady hands, cameraman. There you go. Okay. So,
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basically what happens is if you want to run Crossfire, just native Crossfire,
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you use PCIe slots one and three. Okay.
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If you run want to run Lucid Hydra,
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okay, so that's uh ATI, NVIDIA, or X, which is mixed multiGPU mode, then you
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can use any one of these combinations here. Crossfire X will also work with
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these com with these combinations. But if you want to run it natively, it's
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here. Depending where you want to install your theoretical RAID card or
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other PCIe peripheral, you can get varying um
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uh widths for the PCIe lanes. So you can get up to 16x, 16x, 16x for triple VGA
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mode. And then if you want to run quad VGA, you'll have to settle for 16, 16,
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8, and 8. So there you have it. Let's keep going with this unboxing
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and we'll have a look at the board itself. U that is really like
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yeah I don't know it throws a lot of uh it looks like it probably threw a lot of
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complications into the engineering process. I mean when you're figuring out
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how to how to optimize you know which
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ones are running off the bridge chip and which ones are running natively off the
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chipset and like all this stuff. It's um
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a miracle they managed to make a board like this at all actually
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and a high-end one no less. Look at that. Okay, so that is a very very nice
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looking board. So why don't we start with the general layout. The first thing
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we're going to find on this board is a CPU socket. That's an AM3 socket
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compatible with the latest quad core and six core CPUs from AMD. Up here in the
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top left, you will find an 8pin CPU power connector as well as a very
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elaborate looking PWM and chipset cooling solution. So you can see there's
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a heat pipe. Actually, I'm going to get you to get a slightly different angle on this. First of all, there's fins down
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here. And then there's thicker fins up here. Okay? So, you can see the heat
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pipe is running all the way through here, down this way, under here, over
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here, and then down to the south bridge. And that is actually where the
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hydrolologics chip resides if I recall
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correctly. Let me have a look. I believe it is. Oh, it could also be here.
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Hm. This could be trouble. Well, not sure exactly where it is. My guess would
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be here though. Okay. And you can actually see there is a cooling fan
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inside here as well and it is plugged in right there. So that is probably one of
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the most complicated cooling solutions I've seen on an ASUS board in a very
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long time. Uh because it is an AM3 socket board. You've got support for for
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dual channel DDR3 memory up to 16 gigs. You've got onboard hey look at that core
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unlocker button. That makes it easy, doesn't it? Then you've got start,
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reset, as well as switches for all the PCI
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Express slots. You know what? This can be a lifesaver if you have water cooling. If you're using full cover
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blocks, it's almost impossible to remove one card and not another one. So, if
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you're trying to um to troubleshoot like a dead card or anything like that, this
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can like seriously it's worth its weight in gold. You've got probit, which is
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where you can find out the voltages from a bunch of different aspects of the
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board. So, you've got a ground here. We've got CPU, PLL, CPU, RAM,
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Northbridge. Uh, yeah, a bunch of other stuff, too.
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That's great. Uh, you got a go button. I believe that's actually the memo K
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button. Okay. And then we've got our 24 pin power along the right hand edge of
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the board, exactly where it belongs. Then we have SATA, and they're
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specifically labeling these as optical drive. I guess that's because they're SATA 2, cuz the other six ports are
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actually SATA 3 6 GB per second ports.
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All right, let's keep going down. You can see we've got dual BIOS chips here
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as well as a SIMOS clear button. Then we
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have our front panel connectors, a couple
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H couple of USB headers presumably. Okay,
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so 9 10 7 8.
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Okay. And then I'm not sure what the others are. Okay, that's fine. All four
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pin fan connectors on this particular board and there are quite a few of them.
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And then we've got a couple of auxiliary Molex connectors. So there's one here,
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one up here over by that chipset. So that means if you're loading this up with five GPUs. I mean remember this
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this plug here was not designed to provide that much power through the
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slots on the motherboard. So ASUS has gone ahead and augmented it with a
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couple of additional Molex plugs. Now if you're only running one or two cards,
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it's probably fine not to plug these in. But if you are loading it up with five
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high power cards, definitely plug those in to your power supply. Let's go around
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and have a look at the back of the board on the IO panel. So, we have a PS2 port,
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which I personally still like to see just because sometimes USB keyboards can
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be a little bit finicky when you're running an unstable overclock. We've got
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1 2 3 4 5 six USB 2.0 ports, a SIMOS
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clear, optical audio out that looks like a powered ESATA port as well as a
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regular ESATA port. We have two USB 3.0
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ports, gigabit Ethernet, ROG connect,
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and 7.1 analog audio out. Thank you. Oh,
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no, no, not thank you. Thank you. I mean, thank you. But also, check this
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out. So, we got our one, two, three. These are our normal ATX mounting holes.
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But wait, there's more. This is not an EATX board, but because an EATX board
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would probably be about here, and it would have one more screw hole, but it is actually wider than an ATX board. So
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bear that in mind. If your case is not a little bit wider, it's not going to fit
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this motherboard. Thank you for checking out this unboxing and first look. And
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don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more cool stuff like this. The
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Lucid chip is here. Cameraman and I work together. This is the south bridge. This
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is the Lucid Hydraologics chip. And this is the north bridge. Thank you for
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watching.