ASUS Crosshair mainboard review

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Introduction

When looking at recent motherboards designed by companies like ABIT and DFI, we have to conclude that nowadays mainboards are being produced that are very close to being perfect for gamers. A lot of manufacturers claim that they do have the ultimate board for gamers, but when we received the latest "Gamers Republic" board by ASUS the competition is virtually blown away. Welcome to the world of "Crosshair"..

We start with the basics of the board; The Crosshair motherboard is a socket AM2 board that uses nVidia's nForce 590 SLI chipset. This chipset allows the use of two PCI-Express graphics cards, each able to use the full 16 lanes per slot. Next two these slots the board sports three PCI slots, a PCI-Express x4 slot and a PCI-Express x1 slot. A total of four memorymodules can be used on the board.

Cooling of both parts of the chipset is passive, a heatpipe runs from the MCP55PXE south bridge to the C51XE north bridge, and from there a heatpipe to two copper heatsinks laced around the capacitators near the CPU socket. These heatsinks should pick up some airflow from the CPU fan, but can be cooled by an optional fan that is bundled with the board.

The nForce 590 SLI chipset can support a total of six SATA hard drives, and offers support for RAID 0,1 and 5. Next to nVidia's controller the Silicon Image 3132 SATA controller offers space for another two SATA ports, which ASUS has decided to turn in to external ports (e-SATA). The board sports two gigabit network controllers, both the Marvell Alaska 88E1116 PHY chip and has onboard 7.1 high definition audio in the form of the Analog devices AD1988 chip. To ensure the best audio quality possible the audio connections are placed on a small PCB that is plugged into the motherboard.