Asus Crosshair IV Extreme AMD 890FX Motherboard

Name: Asus Crosshair IV Extreme AMD 890FX Motherboard - Page 5
Brand: Asus

by Joel Hruska — Wednesday, March 09, 2011, 12:30 PM EDT

Our two AMD test systems were configured identically save for the necessary difference in RAM type and speed due to their differing chipsets. Both systems were equipped with 6GB of RAM. The M3A78-T board used DDR2-800—this 780GX-based board has never been fond of DDR2-1066. The Crosshair IV Extreme used Corsair DDR3 rated for 1600MHz but we purposefully backed down to 1333MHz which is the highest, officially supported speed of the 890FX chipset.

HotHardware's Test Systems

Authentic AMD

Motherboards:
Asus M3A78-T
BIOS 1907 (10/22/2010)
AMD 780GX Chipset

Asus Crosshair IV Extreme
BIOS 0502 (11/19/2010)
AMD 890FX Chipset

Processor:
AMD Phenom II X6 1100T
(3.3GHz - 3.7GHz (Turbo Core))

RAM:

Corsair DDR2-800

RAM:
Corsair DDR3-1600@1333MHz
DDR3-1600 (8-8-8-24)

Graphics Card:
Nvidia GTX 480 (x2)

Hard Drive:
Corsair F120 SDD
WD Caviar Black 1TB

Software:
Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
Nvidia Forceware 260.99

Note: We used one GeForce GTX 480 in each system, save when testing Lucid Logix support.

SiSoft Sandra 2010 SP1

Synthetic Benchmark Performance

We began testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA, which stands for System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. We examine a CPU's multimedia and arithmetic performance using Sandra, as well as the motherboard's peak memory bandwidth. The difference between the two platforms should be minor given their identical configurations.

Sandra shows precious little difference between the two motherboards. The one exception is the memory test, where the Crosshair IV Extreme has an obvious advantage.