The ASUS Crosshair IV Formula is a motherboard to lick your fingertips off like it's ice-cream. Though more expensive than your average 890FX motherboard, the investment surely is worth your while if you crave the need for something extreme. You'll receive one terrific looking motherboard, I mean seriously ... the stealthy passive cooling design and black red two-tone theme makes this a hot looking motherboard. Then the choice of component usage is very good as well. Thanks to the chipset you'll have plenty of PCIe bandwidth to accomplish the most extreme things multi-GPU graphics cards wise, and then obviously we need to chat a little about overclocking.

Now I'm not saying that you can't achieve an overlock like what we've shown today on another brand contrary, but the reality is simple .. these motherboards are just made for it they beg you to overclock a little. If you are a bit of a novice or do not want to spend time on overclocking then just push the OC button or within the ASUS software or AMD Overdrive application seek an OC that you prefer. Once you take it to the next level you can overclock in the BIOS really well, there are no real restrictions or limiting factors other then the hardware you have in house to overclock with as well (processor/memory/cooling). So the tweaking options are grand. ASUS also embedded ROG connect onto this motherboard allowing you to overclock through an application on another PC or laptop. It's all pretty dandy stuff. So the level of overclocking is completely up-to you, and ASUS made sure that all bases are covered whether your choice is to go simple, advanced or sophisticated.

So there you have it, while the Crosshair IV isn't perfect we ran into no real limitation or nags either. Once again I would like to see a 2nd Ethernet NIC on the high-end ASUS motherboard as that really is a miss. Voltage monitoring with a multi-meter also is a little so so. It would have been nice to see dedicated sockets just as the Rampage III extreme offers, and not just unhandy conductive touch points. But as little as it is, the Crosshair IV Formula is a grand motherboard with a very deep and extensive feature set that will be to the linking of many hardware enthusiast and aficionado's out there.

The AMD 890FX chipset itself is impressive. We like very much the massive bandwidth available on the PCIe slots, the sheer tweakability, the embedded gigabit NIC but most of all, the integration of the SATA 6G controller. Speaking of which, we are still under whelmed by the AHCI performance of that controller when we peeked at the low file-size performance. It is only a fraction of what it should be. The flip coin side however is that regular SATA/IDE mode performance really surprised us, so just leave it at that for now, until AMD releases a driver that will improve AHCI mode.

Minor quirks at best though, other than that remark, it really is a terrific chipset that is miles ahead of what Intel brings to the table these days. Summing it up, the ASUS Crosshair IV Formula is a grand motherboard with a terrific AMD 890FX chipset. The Crosshair IV will start selling at give or take 170EUR, and I know it's not cheap .. but man .. just look at it and you are sold. Pair it with the new six-core Phenom II X6 1090T and it certainly will accomplish to get your rig that x-factor feel.

Very much recommended as a crucial tweaking platform for AMD processors.

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