CPU/Mobo Asus 990FX - Crosshair V Formula - Working review

So lets start of with the board first:

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Well what can I say, it looks fabulous. The colors just do it for me and this time the PCB is really black. The CH IV had a slight brownish tinge to it so I am happy to see this. So lets start with the main differences between the CH IV and the CH V:

  • AM3+ socket, which may be the difference in BD overclocking
  • 2133+ ram overclocking. The CH IV was rated for 2000 Mhz, but we know we have seen higher clocks, but them have been few and far between.
  • UEFI Bios
  • 8+2 Phase Digi+ VRM's (I will get into more details later
  • 5 Step Load Line Caliberation (The CH IV had 3 steps)
  • Real time power adjustment behavior
  • Anti surge protection
  • Dual drivers for the power components compared to single drivers on the CH IV
  • Intel LAN - A lot of gamers prefer the Intel LAN chipset to Marvell and others and the CH V has it
  • 3 Way SLI/Crossfire X and 4 Way SLI, with an expander card
  • ESATA 6G
  • 6 USB 3 ports as compared to 2 on the CH IV
  • Ai Charger + for charging Iphones and other devices at 3X the speed of normal USB charging
  • Remote GPU OC in addition to remote CPU OC through the ROG software

That's about what I could figure out at this point of time and maybe there are a few more differences which I may find and I will add it to the list. The majority of the changes are to the VRM side of the board, which is one of the most important parts of any motherboard.

Moving on to a proper look at each part of the motherboard:

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Lets start with the socket area. The area is clean and does not have any chips or capacitors for the most part. This will greatly help most CPU heatsinks and waterblocks to be easily compatible as well as help extreme benchers who like to put it under cold. The frame around the CPU is now a two part affair as compared to the older single piece, but it in no way changes the socket mounting in any way. I guess its just done to add some differentiation from the older AM3 boards. The heatsinks by themselves are quite beefy and do a good job of covering the VRM's as well as the NB AND is setup in such a way that the first PCIE slot is free from any protrusions. The mounting system on the heatsinks is a lot better than what it was on the CH IV and I will show you a few shots of that as well. On the right side of the photo above you can see the 8 Pin and an additional 4 Pin connector. The additional 4 Pin is for those that use extreme cooling and this additional 4 Pin brings in the extra power to satisfy the higher power demand. Till now, under water I have not found any use for it, so its mainly for use under LN2 or Dice.

At the bottom right of the picture you can also see the points where the actual voltages can be checked using a Multimeter.

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As discussed above, the VRM and NB heatsinks are a much better affair now and you can see that the thermal pads have great contact between the VRM's and the heatsinks. The screws used are a lot more sturdy as well and they hold a set of aluminium plates at the bottom which help to cool the FET's there as well. But my favoutite part would have to be the ROG "Eye", which is the RED part of the heatsink.

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Moving on, we see the USB 3 connectors for the front panel placed just below the 24 pin connector. I dont see that as much of an issue and should not make a difference to cable routing, though keeping it at the bottom with the rest of the front panel connectors would have probably made more sense.

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Looking at the top rear of the board, you can see the ROG connect on/off switch, which to me is in a place which is not easily accessible. It would have been better to have this switch near the 24 pin or on the rear panel area. We also see a 4 PIN molex connection, which can be used to provide extra power to the PCIE solts for Crossfire/SLI setups. Now this was something that could and should have been moved near the 24 pin or the bottom of the board, to air cable management.

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Moving on to the other side of the top area, we can see all the voltage checking area as well as the Go Button. The Go button helps to stabilise your ram and its a great feature specially on AMD as most ram kits are optimised for Intel.

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Moving on to the bottom of the board, we have the SB heatsink with the ROG logo on it and its a more subdued version of the CH IV one. Rigt below the heatsink we have the ROG chipsets as well as the removable Bios chip. We can also see the Esata port as well as two 4 pin fan connectors. To anyone who has not used the CH IV or most of the newer ROG boards, all the fan connectors are 4 pin and PWN enabled.

Moving on the center of the bottom part of the board has the ROG buttons, with a Power, Reset and an OC button:

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Along with that we see one more 4 pin fan connector as well as a 2 pin temperature probe connector. The board has a number of temperature probes and can be used with most thrid party probes to show the temperature of various locations on the board. I am using one of these to monitor the water temperature on my loop.

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The PCIE slot layout is very similar to the old CH IV and I think it works well enough. The first and third slots do 16x in Crossfire/SLI and 2nd and 4th slots run at 8X each. There is a single PCI slot for use with some older hardware like sound cards or wifi modules.

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At the left side of the board we have the Supreme X-Fi chip, which is in charge of onboard audio. The chip supports EAX Advanced HD 5.0, THX True Studio Pro, X-Fi Extreme Fidelity and Creative Alchemy. Most of this is just jargon for me, but some of the ausio enthusiasts on the forum may be able to understand and explain it better, so I will leave that to them.

Finally we see the rear I/O side of the board:

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The rear has the normal setup, with 4 USB 3 ports, 7 USB 2 ports including a white one for the ROG connect, audio ports and a Clear Cmos port. The one thing I have liked on all ROG boards is the clear Cmos port easily accessible in the rear panel. This helps a lot while setting up ram and benching and is a 100 times easier to use than moving pins around.

That ends this part of the review and the next post will have an in depth look at the UEFI Bios, which I must say is a lot of fun to play with.
 
Nice write up as usual :)

Why not throw in some numbers ?

Ohh and about the new heatsink clips ?Will old AM2+/Am3 cooler work with these ?
 
Yes the old Heat sinks work without any issues as they need to be fixed from the top and bottom only. The sides were not used at all. Anyway most of the new ones have their ownountubg system, which also remains the same. Numbers will be coming in after a view of the bios.
 
Thanks guys. I am not much of an Audio guy, but from what I understand the chip is better than other onboard sound chips, but will not match a sound card in quality.

--- Updated Post - Automerged ---

Ok staring off on the bios now. This is the first screen of the bios as soon as you enter. oh and BTW you can use a mouse...

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This is the advanced mode. The simple mode, is well, a lot more simple and straight forward. So for those of you who don't like playing with the Bios too much, but still want a high end board, that's the place to go. The first set of screens are from the Extreme Tweaker screen of the bios. This is the screen that most of the people are going to want to play with and it has a wealth of options.

The first option we see is the "Load Extreme Profiles". This is a predefined overclock which takes into account the processor that you use and gives you a safe OC point to start working from. Not something I used a lot, but its there and its useful. The rest of the settings have to do with CPU, CPU/NB, Memory and HT Link multiples. Unluckily using a 1090T gives as a ram option only till 1600 Mhz. We can also enable and disable AMD Turbo Core from here.

The second picture takes us further down the same list, with a whole lot of options for manual ram timings and drive strengths, manual control of the Digi+ VRM settings and the first of many many voltage settings. The "Extreme OV" option allows us to use more aggressive voltages for use under Dice or LN2. The third picture shows us the rest of the voltage settings. As you can see there are innumerable options you can tweak, but remember many can be left on Auto if you don't want to work with them, or don't really understand what they do.

I want to now move back to the ram timings and drive strengths that I mentioned before. These menus further open out into these:

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This is the sub menu in which you can tweak the hell out of your ram. There are a lot of options and again, a lot of them can be left on Auto if required. The drive strengths is something that I have just about started playing with and it may give you that extra 100 Mhz of boost while doing a benching session. For most users, the top 4 timings in the first picture will be more than enough.

Lets also take a quick look at the Digi+ VRM settings that we mentioned before:

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As you can see you can tweak a whole lot of settings for various parts of the power circuitry, from CPU, CPU/NB calibration to voltage protection. You can set most of them to Auto or Medium for regular use.

Moving on to the part of the Bios, under the Main Tab:

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Pretty self explanatory I would think.

Moving on to the Advanced Tab:

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The advanced tab helps you to set various configurations for your CPU, SATA, USB, NB and also lets you setup the ROG function. The last option is LED control, which lets you control the way each LED behaves on the board, as well as allowing you to shut them off.

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The Onboard devices button also takes you to a sub menu to help control your storage options:

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Pretty simple and straight forward here. The next tab is a bit more interesting for me. This is the Monitor Tab:

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Now here is where you can check various Voltages, temperatures and fan speeds. Also with all the 4 Pin fan headers and temperature probe headers, you can set this up to give you a whole lot of information. First up, here is the Voltage monitor. Remember software monitoring of voltages is never perfect:

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Next we have the Temperature Monitor:

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The Opt Temperatures are the ones which can be used with third party probes and I am currently using Opt 3 to check my water temperatures. Pretty cool and I really like how it was just plug and play. You also have the option to set overheat parameters here. I miss having some more temperature readings off the board, but a future bios may fix that.

Next up is the Fan Speed Monitor:

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And finally the fan control:

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Again very interesting as you can make your own fan curve, change it and tweak it to your liking. It works extremely well for some of the fans that I have connected to the board.

Next up is the Boot Tab:

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This again is quite simple and I am sure you guys dont need too much explanation on this.

Finally we come to the Tools Tab:

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This is another interesting part of the bios. The EZ flash utility is a Bios update facility. Next up we have the SPD profile button. I love this as it gets all the information from your memory without you having to search for it o the internet:

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Very important, specially when playing with timings and speeds.

Next up, we have a screen which allows you to save and load OC profiles. Up to 8 profiles can be saved at a time. Remember that updating a bios removes these settings:

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And finally we have the Go Button screen:

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The Go button screen allows you to set an overclock that can be activated from within an operating system by pressing the Go button. You can set a whole lot of parameters for your overclock and then unleash it by using the Go button on the board.

Well, that about covers the Bios, now we will move on to synthetic benchmarks.
 
Guys, I would love to see more input from you all. That makes the whole process a lot more interactive.

Anyway was testing the load line calibration on the board and it works excellent. I was using the bundled ROG software and it is head and shoulders above the rpevious one which shipped with the CH IV. Its almost as good as using the bios itself.

Coming back to the test, what I did was ramp up the clocks to 4 Ghz and run 5 loops of Intel Burn Test. AT the same time I used AIDA to get a graph of the voltage movements:

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What I set was 1.425, what was reported was 1.428. The swing was between 1.428-1.40V, which is absolutely amazing. On the older CH IV I had to set at 1.385 and set Load line on Full, then it would swing from 1.385-1.435 or so. So in my mind the Digi+ VRM tweaking is a big plus here.
 
the new BIOS looks nice :) i think the slot placement could have been a bit better, running 3 cards will be a bit of a tight fit i fell. Any idea when this board will be available and the price??
 
^^Its not the regular BIOS that has been used till date :| Its UEFI BIOS that has the ability to boot from driver >2.2Tb capacity along with nice interface and mouse gestures.
 
Starting off with the benchmarks now. I have done some testing, and the difference between the CH IV and V is minimal. So I will be posting only the CH V results. The setup is as follows:

AMD 1090T BE

Asus Crosshair V Formula

Asus 5850

Super Talent 1600 CL 6-6-6

Cooler Master HAF X and Silent Pro 700W

Seagate 500 GB HDD

Water cooled

OS: Windows 7 Ultimate 32 bit

Settings:

AMD 1090t @ 3.6 Ghz, NB @ 2.6Ghz

Super Talent Ram at 1600 CL 6-6-6

Asus 5850 - Stock settings

I have kept the OC very low, so that you guys can run the same tests on your own setups and see any difference.

So lets get this started. First up, Super Pi 1m:

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Next Super Pi 32m:

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WPrime 32M and 1024M:

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AIDA Cache and Memory Benchmark:

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Sandra Memory Latency:

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Sandra Memory Bandwidth:

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Sandra Processor Multimedia:

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Sandra Processor Arithmetic:

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Sandra Overall score:

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Next up we have GeekBench:

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Cinebench Open GL:

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Cinebench CPU:

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And some quick gaming benchmarks:

FF XIV:

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And Shogun 2 DX 11 High:

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That about covers it for us on the benchmark side.

Well, there is an extremely small difference between the two boards and that's mainly as this is just a renamed 890FX chipset. Asus has done well to add a few bits which help performance, but there is not much of an upgrade in it as of now. With Bulldozer, the Digi+ VRM should work its magic and the new P states will also come into play.

With that said, Asus has done a great job of putting together a board with top end features across the board. There are a few placements of ports that I fail to understand, but other than that the board with all its features, the UEFI bios and all the other extras make this a compelling buy. I also hope Asus works on the boot up time as UEFI is supposed to reduce boot times quite a bit. Other than that, I cant find any real fault with the board and even with a Beta Bios, it works great. So, for anyone looking for a top end AMD board, the buck stops here.

Thanks for reading and till next time.........
 
Dark Star said:
^^Its not the regular BIOS that has been used till date :| Its UEFI BIOS that has the ability to boot from driver >2.2Tb capacity along with nice interface and mouse gestures.

yes i know. Thats why i said NEW BIOS!!
 
nice board. crappy layout though. how is this compared to the 990fx sabertooth? that has almost same features and $30 less. Whats the expected retail price in india?
 
Any reasons why it is a crappy layout, specially sincee you can run a 4 way Sli setup? I don't mean this in a bad way, but after all the advice you have given me over the last few days, I think you need to read and experience a lot more before giving out any more advice. And once again I mean this in the best possible way, but I can't find a nicer way to say this
 
i was worried about the usb3 connectors. but yes im sorry i thought it would obstruct the 24pin connectors. also in a three way GPU setup wouldn't the lower PCIe slots be too close to each other? also once again the great big coolers(nh-d14) will obstruct the first two ram slots. Im just speculating here. but dont mind those. im not that a great mobo guager anyway. no problem at all if u beret me. something to learn from the great mav right:)

the major question here is how this compares to asus sabertooth and is it worth the price difference($30)? because i plan to upgrade to one of these when they release.
 
thanks a ton for a great review and nice walkthrough with BIOS.
I would like to see what are idle power consumption and at load power consumptions.
also in storage review I want to see how food is onboard Sata controller in case of 6 gbps ports.
thanks again for nice review.
 
Sorry dude can't do any more benchmarks as I have already returned the mobo. Idle figures for full rig are with me. But again it's similar to existing 890fx combos.

@ cool, well the nh d14 has the same issue with most if not all the boards out there. The usb3 is really not in the way, but should have been at the bottom with the rest of the headers. And I have seen a 4 wY setup on the board recently… no issues. Hope that solves your queries. The one thing I don't like is the molex 4 pin.
 
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