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You've got the best of the best. With Asus joining in the game of implementing lucid hydra 200 chip onto their motherboard together with MSI, we can finally see some competition between these two board makers. From Asus, I introduce you Crosshair IV Extreme, part of the Republic of Gamers series.
In fact, Asus Crosshair IV Extreme is the FIRST AMD chipset motherboard equipped with the Lucid Hydra chip. ( The MSI bigbang fuzion had a lucid hydra chip on an Intel P55 chipset motherboard)
What is lucid?
In easier terms, Lucid is a new platform that allows more flexible multiple GPU scaling(think Crossfire X and SLI). Now, with the new lucid hydra 200 chip, it is possible to run an GTX480 together with a 5870, getting the best of both world from Nvidia and ATI. Since there are 5 PCI-E slots on the Asus Crosshair IV Extreme, you can mix and match any graphics card from both vendors and attain unbeatable performance on this platform.

Looks
The combination of red and black colour on the Asus Crosshair IV Extreme allows this motherboard to stand out from the rest. Many people prefer black PCBs because they look so much better than the conventional green. Red goes well especially with black. Furthermore, red is loved by AMD fanboys! This board will certainly attract many AMD/ATI fanboys.

Features

Looking at the number of capacitors at the VRM area, you can be sure that the current supplied to the CPU will definitely be very clean. This board will certainly be a potential overclock record holder with Super ML capacitors.

ROG Connect

Crosshair IV Extreme is part of Asus Republic of Gamers series of motherboard. ROG connect allows users to connect to the main system from an external device. On the fly overclocking purely based on a hardware level will crank your system up to perform better or gain a few frames per second even when you are in a game.

Dual BIOS

As mentioned above, this is a great board for overclockers. The dual bios will ensure that your computer boots up even if it is unstable. The second bios chip will ensure that minimal time is lost during extreme overclocking when liquid nitrogen vapourises every second. You get what I mean. It never harms having a second bios chip. It greatly reduces hassles in overclocking.

Voltage reading points

There are voltage reading points on the motherboard so that overclockers can get the different voltages supplied to the different part of the board accurately to ensure stability of the system.

USB3.0

With USB 3.0 fully featured with the motherboard, transfer rate are up to 5Gbps via USB 3.0. Transfer movies from your external hard drive in just a few seconds.

AMD 890FX Chipset

Enthusiast platform which allows quad crossfire at pci-e x8,x8,x8,x8 when fully populated. Put in your favourite thuban cores processors for ultimate performances with 6 cores.

AMD SB850 southbridge chipset

The first southbridge chipset to feature SATA 6Gbps natively. You will be assured to be future proof with this motherboard with SATA 6Gbps. Performances gain with newer SATA 6Gbps SSDs that are currently in the market will be significant.

Hardware RAID chip

Ensure your best RAID performances with hardware raid chip integrated onto the motherboard.

PCI-E x16 switches

The switches will allow you to check the functionality of the different graphics card you have, especially because of the hydra lucid chip found on the board. This ensures that your system is up and running again easily if any one of the graphics card is down.

Conclusion :The Asus Crosshair IV Extreme is definitely the best 890fx board in the market. Its performance should be great and I suppose it will look even better with its heatsinks attached. I'm waiting forward to testing this board out and am sure that it will not regret me and AMD fanboys alike.

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