Presentaion / Layout / I/O / Bundle

Presentation

The Crosshair IV Extreme comes with the very typical ROG colors which are black and red. In this case the PCB comes in black as well as northbridge, southbridge and capacitor cooling blocks. Red are the PCI-Express x16 slots, two DIMM slots as well as four SATA ports. It seems like everything that symbolizes speed has been kept in red. Everything together ends up in a very nice and homogenous design which you might already expect from a ROG-series motherboard.

Layout

For once we find "only" one huge heatsink covering the current converters as well as the northbridge. At a first glance the design might not look very effective but the sheer size and mass will prove differently in our further tests. On the following picture you can see the four DDR3 Slots that come arranged in pairs and quite close to the CPU socket. The board supports Dual-Channel and the memory will be plugged into the DIMM-Slots alternated to provide free space between them. This might help the memory temperature especially when one plans to overclock it. Definitely a plus point for the layout is the fact that the first two PCI-e (for CrossFire, because the PCI-e #2 is only used for CrossLinx) slots are quite far from each other. This is very useful for a CrossFire setup where the two cards can become really hot when they're right next to eachother. Furthermore there is also one legacy PCI slot which can be use for additional expansion cards.

Reset, power and the core unlocker button are very well placed, right next to the DIMM slots. You can access them in almost every situation. Furthermore one can also find five switches that allow you to enable/disbale PCIe x16 slots and seven points to measure voltages. There also is a GO button which allows you to load previously saved settings.

I/O

The rear panel is very well equipped. It has got a PS/2 for the keyboard, six USB2, two USB3, one ethernet port, a CLR_CMOS button, a IEEE 1394a port, an eSATA port and a full audio panel. In addition, we have a the ROG connector and a switch button to enable/disable ROG Connect.

ASUS equipped the Crosshair IV Extreme with a total of six SATA3 and two SATA2 connectors but unfortunately there are no internal USB3.0 ports for a front panel. But never the less there are three internal USB2.0 connectors. There is the front panel audio connector, an IEEE 1394a connector and two molex connectors to provide additional power to PCIe slots can also be found on this PCB. The last picture shows you the two BIOS chips ASUS has put onto this board and the button that allows you to switch between them.

At this point one can see the eight different 4-pin fan connectors which have been located all over the board. As a consequence there is always a fan header when you should ever need one.

Bundle

The Crosshair IV Extreme's delivery comes with a lot of accessories. You find a manual, the I/O shield, six SATA3 cable, two SATA2 cable, the Bluetooth RC card, the ASUS ROG DVD (drivers, software and 3DMark Vantage), a 3DMark Vantage Advanced serial, the ROG Connect cable, two ASUS connectors, two Probe-lt cables, a pack of twelve cable ties, stickers for SATA the cables, a crossfire bridge, three thermal probes and finally a ROG theme sticker.

Page 1 - ASUS Crosshair IV Extreme	Page 9 - SuperPi/WPrime
Page 2 - Specifications	Page 10 - Games
Page 3 - Presentaion/Layout/I/O/Bundle	Page 11 - Software / Hardware ROG
Page 4 - BIOS	Page 12 - Temperatures
Page 5 - Test Setup	Page 13 - Overclocking
Page 6 - FutureMark	Page 14 - Lucid HydraLogix
Page 7 - SiSoft Sandra 1	Page 15 - Conclusion
Page 8 - SiSoft Sandra 2

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