Verdict: Asus has the AMD overclocking crown in its sights
Motherboard names often appear to be just strings of arbitrary code, so to see a motherboard called simply 'Crosshair' makes a refreshing change. We still can't shake off the feeling that the Asus Crosshair Deluxe XPX Z-72i 32X is just around the corner though.
With a price tag of just over £150, the Crosshair goes head to head with other high-end AM2 SLI motherboards, such as the Abit Fatal1ty AN9 32X and Foxconn's C51XEM2AA-8EKRS2H. Like these boards, the Crosshair is based on Nvidia's top-of-the-range nForce 590 SLI chipset, and has two 16x PCI-E slots and support for up to 8GB of PC2-6400 DDR2 RAM.
You'll be pleased to note that the Crosshair isn't deficient in the LED department either. The strip of blue LEDs illuminating the bottom half of the Crosshair look cool, and the Power, Reset and CMOS-clear switches are illuminated as well. The back panel is similarly Las Vegas, with an LCD showing what stage the motherboard has reached during POST, and illuminated port labelling to help you out when you're fumbling around the back of your case for a free USB slot.
The lighting contrasts nicely with the industrial-looking copper heatsinks and heatpipes, which passively cool the Southbridge, Northbridge and VRMs. In the past, we've found that heatpipe-assisted chipset cooling such as this tends to have the effect of dumping cumulative heat from the Southbridge and Northbridge onto the VRMs, so it's critical to have a well-cooled case. It's fortunate then that the Crosshair has eight 3-pin fan headers. The VRMs themselves are part of an 8-phase power design that should be good for overclocking.
Our main gripe with the Fatal1ty board is that it has only one PCI slot and, as this is situated too close to the slave 16x PCI-E slot, it's useless if you install a second dual-slot graphics card. The Crosshair has a much more sensible arrangement. It has just one 4x PCI-E slot, which will be obstructed by a graphics card with dual-slot cooler, but it has three PCI slots, one of which is located above the uppermost 16x PCI-E slot. So you can have a fully-fledged SLI arsenal without having to forgo the luxury of a Creative X-Fi.
Having said that, you may not see any need to improve on the Crosshair's built-in sound chip. The Crosshair is endowed with 8-channel HD audio, with most of the outputs located on a separate daughterboard. As well as the usual analogue surround-sound connections, there are also optical and coaxial S/PDIF outputs, which is nice to see. The Crosshair even has an on-board DTS encoder, which encodes multi-channel sound into a DTS bitstream that can then be outputted to a compatible DTS speaker system.
The Crosshair offers a good array of ports. There are 6 S-ATA II ports, with another two on the back panel for external S-ATA II drives, plus a single EIDE port. Unlike the Fatal1ty, the Crosshair also supports FireWire. The only noticeable absence is on-board wireless networking, but this is hardly essential for a gaming motherboard.
PERFORMANCE
As it's an nForce 590 SLI-based motherboard, we weren't surprised by the Crosshair's decent stock performance. The image editing score of 1.30, while 2 per cent slower than the Foxconn, is slightly faster than the Fatal1ty's 1.28. DVD encoding was similarly solid, with the Crosshair achieving a score of 1.10, compared to the Foxconn's 1.12.
While the multitasking score of 1.55 was also slightly below that of the Foxconn, which scored 1.58, the Crosshair's overall score of 1.32 means that it was only 2 per cent slower than the Foxconn, which, at stock settings, is the fastest AM2 board that we've seen.
It's the task of overclocking for which the Crosshair is designed, though, and accordingly, the BIOS sports a wide array of tweakable voltage and frequency options. The CPU voltage can be raised to a sizzling 1.85V, and the DDR2 can be increased to a mesospheric 3.425V (slightly higher than stratospheric). Just as importantly, the Northbridge voltage can also be raised to 1.575V, and the Southbridge to a whopping 1.875V.
With the multiplier of our test CPU lowered, the FSB of the Abit Fatal1ty maxed out at 315MHz and refused to boot at anything higher. The Crosshair, however, was happy running our benchmarks with an FSB of 360MHz, which is a huge difference, although in order to hit 360MHz, we had to apply maximum voltages to the chipset.
The passive heatsinks on the Crosshair mean that you'll need a case with good airflow if you want to push things this far though. Asus has included a small cooler to attach to the heatsinks if you need a cooling boost but you may want to fit a fan in your case to direct strong airflow over the Northbridge and VRMs. It's also worth noting that Asus told us that, unlike some other heatpipe-equipped motherboards, the Crosshair will work in cases that have an inverted motherboard layout, due to its new heatpipe design.
Our AM2 test CPU, an Athlon 64 X2 4200+, usually maxes out at just under 3GHz. With the Crosshair, we were able to do just that; we pushed it to 2.937GHz, using an FSB of 267MHz and the default multiplier of 11, although the 1.7V that the CPU required to run our tests meant that we had to point a 120mm fan at our Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 Pro HSF to keep the temperatures down.
The heavily overclocked Crosshair flew through our Media Benchmarks. The image editing score increased to 1.71, DVD encoding improved to 1.48, and in multitasking, it delivered a score of 2.09. The Crosshair's overall score when overclocked was 1.76, so it was able to squeeze even more performance out of our test chip than the Fatal1ty, which scored 1.72 with a 266MHz FSB. One concern was that we had to turn our case into a wind farm in order to prevent the passively cooled chipset and VRMs from overheating.
CONCLUSION
The Crosshair is the best overclocking AM2 motherboard we've seen so far, and its nifty features, such as DTS encoding, sweeten the deal. Of course, with affordable Core 2 Duo CPUs now available, you could make a strong case that the Socket AM2 Crosshair is based on the wrong platform for performance junkies. However, an overclocked Athlon 64 X2 still offers great performance and if you want to get the most from a Socket AM2 CPU then the Crosshair is the board to buy.
