Product gallery Crosshair IV Formula

Unfortunately only one BIOS is to be found at the Crosshair IV Formula. In this range a second one for backup or overclocking purposes would have been nice.

We spot the accustomed reset and power-on buttons that ASUS has on all their ROG motherboards. to the left is the OC button, press it when powered down, startup your system and the processor will automatically overclock. In our case the Phenom II X6 1090T processor clocked itself from a 3200 MHz base frequency towards 3700 MHz pretty much on the fly, and it remained stable.

The second button with the padlock is a core unlocker. Say you purchase the new (unnamed) Phenom X4 processor based on the Thuban core ... this button will activate the two disabled cores. And if you are lucky, they will not be damaged and you can use them. Always a bit if a gamble, but the implementation here is very simple. if it works it works, if it doesn't .. well it doesn't.

Also we spot four physical x16 PCIe slots (supports x16; x16/x16; x16,x8,x8 and x8/x8/x8/x8). The 890FX has a lot of bandwidth to offer and play around with. NVIDIA SLI by the way is NOT supported.

Okay, one last look my friends ... then it's crunch time. Priced at roughly 150~180 EUR this is going to bone kick'ass board alright. But it's time to see how well it performs don't you think ? First we'll be managing a little stress test at default configuration.