Introduction
For some time now the Crosshair Formula series from ASUS has been the premier board of choice for those pushing the AMD platform. It has had superior efficiency, superior performance and in all but some subzero scenarios has provided better clocking of AMD cpus. Now ASUS have brought a new player to the market, the Crosshair 4 Extreme, with a bunch of new features to boot.
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Conclusions
I want to leave these results fairly open and let you decide your own conclusions.
Personally I think this board is a better choice if you are interest in 2D benchmarks due to its superior memory performance. If you want to push your CPU with high voltage under LN2 perhaps the Extreme is also your preferred choice due to beefed up PWM and the nice additional of PCI-E on/off switches.
The one huge benefit I see for overclockers is the Lucid Hydra chip. If used in the right combinations (and I am sure there are 100s of different combinations you can try) there might be some huge gains to be had in a number of 3D benchmarks. I only touched the surface with 2x 5870's in Vantage. I am looking forward to seeing the innovative ways people use Hydra with 3D benchmarks.
For gamers having SLI on the AMD chipset without low performing (but ingenius) software hacks will be very inticing. There are alot of AMD fan boys that I am sure would love to grab a pair of 470s or maybe even a quartet of 480s. Right now Hydra only offers 3 way SLI/CF but a driver update should be available in the near future to extend that to 4 way.
I like the Crosshair 4 Formula and use it for the majority of my AMD benching but I LOVE the Crosshair 4 Extreme and unfortunately for the Formula I think it might have to sit in its box a little more...
