ASUS 2010 Product Seminar
The Crosshair IV Extreme, introducing Lucid SLI and Turbo Unlocker.
Published: 28th May 2010 | Source: ASUS |
The Crosshair IV Extreme
ASUS’ beastly new AMD motherboard, the Crosshair IV Extreme is almost worthy of a 5 page news article on its own. It’s a good job we’ll be reviewing one in the near future, as ASUS seem to have crammed every extreme overclocking feature imaginable onto the board to cater to the hardest of the hardcore overclockers and there is far too much to squeeze into one page. But I’ll try anyway.
The Extreme is loosely based on the Crosshair IV Formula, ASUS’ current top of the line 890FX board, aimed at the high end gaming segment. The Formula is a great board in itself, but the ‘Extreme’ moniker promises more, and it delivers the goods.
Lucid
nVidia do not support SLI on AMD’s chipsets at all, and that just won’t do on ASUS’ flagship ‘Extreme’ board. ASUS have used Lucid’s Hydra to enable up to 3 way SLI or 4 way CrossFireX configurations, with the PCI Express slots spaced to allow up to 4 dual-slot cards to fit just fine.
Turbo Unlocker
Turbo Unlocker is ASUS’ improvement upon AMD’s Turbo Core technology. Unlike AMD's solution, which is only available on their 6-core CPUs, Turbo Unlocker also supports the Phenom II black edition (2/3/4 cores).
Turbo Unlocker dynamically overclocks the CPU cores in relation to the work load, for example boosting one core by 500MHz for a single threaded application which can only utilize one core. The ASUS solution also provides a boost for multi-threaded (using 2 or more cores) and highly threaded applications (all cores active).
The Crosshair IV Extreme also features ASUS' TPU (Turbo Processing unit) which is worthy of its own page later in the article.
CSS Valid
ROG Connect looks intriguing. The Ares also looks absolutely stunning. I'd like someone to figure out a way to connect 4 of them suckers together!