Asus Crosshair Motherboard

Asus Crosshair is a high performance motherboard for gamers. It is based on

NVIDIA's nForce 590 SLI chipset, and has 2 PCI Express x16 slots. It has 1x PCI

Express x 4 and 3 PCI 2.2 slots. It supports AMD socket AM2, and can take the

Athlon 64 X2, Athlon 64 FX, Athlon 64 and Sempron CPUs, with FSB of 2000/1600

MT/s . This motherboard has four memory slots which support upto 8 GB RAM. It

has six SATA ports, four USB ports and supports RAID 0, 1 and 5. Apart from the

fans, it has a heat pipe that runs over the motherboard and around the

processor. There is also a tiny fan mounted over this heat pipe for extra

cooling. For diagnostics it has a 'LCD Poster' installed, i.e. basically a LCD

display screen, which tells you what is the problem with your system during the

booting sequence. We have tested this motherboard with AMD Athlon 64 x2 Dual

Core Processor 3800 at 2009 MHz, with 1 GB RAM, Windows XP SP1 and Radeon X1950

series graphic card. Running 3DMark 05 and 3D Mark 06 on it, the scores were

9974 and 5779 3D Marks respectively. These scores are slightly lower than MSI

P6N SLI motherboard. Scores of this motherboard in PC Mark05 and DOOM 3 were

fair enough, hence making it a great performer in gaming.

Bottom Line: Considering its features and price, it's a good choice

for a gaming machine.