101 on the ASUS ROG Crosshair IV Formula 

ASUS has released the scrumptious ASUS ROG Crosshair IV Formula, which now supports Dual Channel DDR3 2000MHz on AMD Platforms as well. Before we dive into a photo-shoot, here's the PR skinny courtesy of ASUS.

Core principles behind the conception of the Crosshair IV Formula include meticulous attention to detail and listening to community feedback. Under the eye-catching design, the Crosshair IV Formula boasts ROG Connect for instant tweaking and monitoring of gaming rigs, user-friendly overclocking interface Turbo Key II and proprietary ASUS technologies Core Unlocker and GameFirst. All these guarantee tremendous success with top-line gaming PCs, as the new board offers exhilarating foundations to build upon.
 
The Crosshair IV Formula deploys the latest chipset architecture from AMD, opening up the current performance CPUs on the market. Enabling processors to come into their own is exactly what a good motherboard does, and the new Crosshair achieves this in several ways—not least of which is ROG Connect, a built-in overclocking engine that maximizes benchmark scores by tuning and monitoring from a remote PC via USB, like a notebook. This way users can overclock while benchmarking, so all resources remain available to better performance. ROG Connect also serves as an in-depth monitoring tool—gearheads can easily obtain readings to see the effects mods such as overvolting have on their system.

ASUS and Republic of Gamers also announce Core Unlocker, an exclusive technology praised by worldwide media, to inject great value and performance into gaming setups. It’s well known that many CPUs come with multiple cores deactivated during fabrication, and Core Unlocker brings those back to life. Users simply have to press one button on the board and the AMD CPU placed in the socket goes through a physical scan in search of dormant cores. Dual core CPUs can become triple or quad in minutes, with obvious computing horsepower benefits.
 
Naturally, the more cores available the bigger the overclocking threshold. Speaking of thresholds, the Crosshair IV Formula comes with the latest version of Turbo Key II, an auto-tuning routine that lets users engage, sit back, reap the benefits and then rule their game with untold confidence.
 
Turbo Key II runs extensive overclocking automatically, detecting hardware tolerances and testing them to ensure stability. The excellent thermal design of the new Crosshair IV Formula means there’s quite a lot of envelope pushing to be done safely, guaranteeing impressive gains. Once more, all users need to do is press the O.C button on the board and let the technology take it from there.
 
Storage comes in the form of six SATA 6GB/s and three SATA 3GB/s, ample room for growth and saving all the newest and biggest game titles. Also, the Crosshair IV Formula includes two USB 3.0 ports, which are much faster than USB 2.0 in every way. There’s also HD audio from integrated SupremeFX X-Fi, fully EAX 4.0 compliant and ready to make those intense engagements roar with clear surround sound.

ASUS includes software ASUS ROG Connect with the Crosshair IV as well, which allows you to overclock the PC from another PC, or your laptop. We explained this technology several times already in previous reviews.

If the overclocked PC crashes, you reboot and will still have the settings available at say that laptop. Change them, apply them and you are good to go.

You make the connection with the help of a special (included) bi-male USB cable (5V power line cut), and in the near future it will even be possible to utilize this connection to flash the BIOS of the motherboard, even if it died completely after say a firmware crash.

reference shot

ASUS ROG Connect works nice. What's the best for me is that after a crash you reboot the crashed system, while you retained the settings on the other PC.  So you can immediately start where you left off.

Check out some other, newly introduced features with the help of an extensive photo-shoot. Okay, let's have a peek