ASUS Crosshair Evolution

ASUS Crosshair Evolution 

Introduction

It’s Thursday, so that means on many parts of the internet it is “throwback Thursday”. Now, because we’re nerdy spods here at OC3D Towers we don’t think that any of you would be interested in seeing what we looked like back in our youth, but we did think that maybe you’d be interested in looking at some older motherboards.

The difficulty was in choosing which platform to go for, and how far back. Whilst our more publicly visible leader might seem old to some of you whippersnappers, he is a mere sapling in comparison to me.

I started my computer journey with a 1K ZX81, and was gaming in arcades before that, back when the only way that you had colour on the screen was to utilise transparent overlays in much the same way that as children we’ve all looked through a sweet wrapper and enjoyed the world suddenly turning purple. The home computer market was swamped with a variety of machines, most of which fell by the wayside. The best way to play games was either to sit and laboriously type them in from a magazine – usually to discover a couple of hours later that there was error either in your typing or in the listing itself. Oh the fun we used to have typing all afternoon, running it, getting a syntax error, going back through line by line and maybe, just maybe, getting a minutes play before you had to turn it off because Dad had come home and wanted the television.

The best way to game was unquestionably to get the tape recorder, spend a fortnight making sure the volume was at the correct setting, get the game loading, go and have your dinner, leave the table before pudding to “turn over to side two and press continue”. Then, if you were really lucky, by the time you’d scoffed down your ice cream there would be a glorious game you could play for the ten minutes you had left before you had to brush your teeth and go to bed. From thence I followed the usual path of people my age where we had a C64, Amiga before finally getting a PC. Mine was a 386SX-16. A whole 16MHz of EGA gloriousness. 40MB hard drive. Commander Keen. Life was good.

So yes, I’m fricking old and that is why it has been tasked to me to take you on a short trip down memory lane. But which memory lane to go down? With big changes in technology and chipsets manufacturers usually take the opportunity to change their models to catch the eager eye of the prospective purchaser. The opportunity to have an entire lineage is extremely limited. Fortunately a side effect of AMD sticking resolutely to the same socket means that ASUS have kept the Crosshair brand for six motherboards now. We have them all to hand, so we thought we’d see how they evolved, whilst also finding out how little our brains have retained under the endless sea of hardware we have to be aware of.

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