Asus Crosshair IV Extreme review

Can this excellent flagship Republic of Gamers board revive hardcore interest in HydraLogix technology?

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The Crosshair IV Extreme
The Crosshair IV Extreme lives up to its name

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Unlike previous motherboards we've looked at carrying Lucid's chip, Asus's Crosshair IV Extreme offers a wide range of options when it comes to setting up the graphics in dual, triple or quad modes.

A word of caution when setting up cards with large third-party coolers to use the Hydra chip, though: we fitted a card into the second PCIe slot and adding a card into the fourth slot proved a problem. There was little airflow around it, which forced us to use the fifth slot. Unfortunately, this runs at x8 speed unlike the other four, which run at full x16 speed.

Games Performance
FarCry2 
(1680 x 1024 small ranch benchmark 4xFSAA, Ultra in-game settings, in average fps)

HD5830 68.05
HD5830 Crossfire 88.86
GTX460 73.64
GTX460 SLI (Hydra) 60.27
GTX460+HD5830 59.56

(1920 x 1200 small ranch benchmark 4xFSAA, Ultra in-game settings, in average fps)

HD5830 59.88
HD5830 Crossfire 76.58
GTX460 63.15
GTX460 SLI (Hydra) 54.39
GTX460+HD5830 55.98