Asus recently revealed a sneak-peek at some of its hottest new Republic of Gamers (ROG) hardware that it will show off soon. Some in-depth info about the full-size Crosshair IV Extreme was managed, which uses the Lucid Hydra chip to allow Nvidia and ATI cards to be used simultaneously, weighed up the heaviest graphics card ever held with the dual Radeon HD 5870 Ares and slobber over the new Rampage III Gene, a micro-ATX X58 board that accepts no settlement.
The Crosshair IV Extreme, the first in consideration is one of the most feature-rich motherboards available for AMD processors. It’s a step up from the Crosshair IV Formula found inside the DinoPC 6th Sense, and is based on AMD’s 890FX plus SB850 chipset combo, which brings native SATA 6Gb/s (SATA III). USB 3.0 is also present courtesy of the usual NEC controller, and the Crystal Clash design is visually impressive.
The prime most desirable of all features is Core Unlocker, which as its name suggests activates disabled cores so that you can turn your tri-core CPU into a quad-core and maybe even quad-core into hex-core. When Asus was asked about a likely success rate, it revealed that in its own testing, cores were successfully unlocked (i.e. stable under heavy load) in around 90% of cases. Unlike some competing solutions, Asus’ system will also mechanically disable faulty cores.
Turbo Unlocker also offers a notable benefit against AMD’s Turbo Core, auto-overclocking tool, in that it can take full advantage of the performance of all cores rather than just some. It even works with CPUs that don’t support Turbo Core at all and should provide a minimum 10% performance boost in relevant applications.
Other features are alike to those found on the Asus M4A89GTD Pro/USB3, except that RC Bluetooth is now also on hand. The major talking point with this motherboard and what really sets it apart from Asus’ Crosshair IV Formula, however, is its use of Lucid’s Hydra chip. As already mentioned, this allows virtually any combination Nvidia and ATI cards to be used simultaneously in the board’s four 16x PCIe slots, with the chip cleverly dividing the workload between cards so that each one is used optimally.
Although this chip has been around for a while in MSI’s top-end gaming board, there were performance issues with it before, so the Crosshair IV Extreme is the first Asus board to offer it. Asus has been working closely with Lucid for two years now to ensure that these issues are overcome, and assures its solution will give you higher performance than standard CrossFire or SLI setups, which seems like a very impressive feat. Though the Hydra chip does require a specialized driver to work, we expect the average turnaround of Lucid versions of new graphics driver enhancements from Nvidia and ATI would be around two weeks, which is again quite notable.
Tags: Amd Processors, asus crosshair, ati cards, cpu, crosshair 4 extreme, Graphics Card, heavy load, micro atx, slobber, unlocker, usb3