ASUS Finally Releases ROG Crosshair IV Extreme Motherboard

[TheMailMan78]

No, you're not. It's what I said then, and what I said now. They're both consistent.

Well then I'm confused. The way I read it is I can combine a 480 with a 5850 for some kind of hybrid GPU setup. This could be beyond say an X58 chipset which can do Crossfire and SLI.

Am I right? If not enlighten me.

 

[pantherx12]

Well then I'm confused. The way I read it is I can combine a 480 with a 5850 for some kind of hybrid GPU setup. This could be beyond say an X58 chipset which can do Crossfire and SLI.

Am I right? If not enlighten me.

Yes you can do that man, it's just not called Sli/Crossfire was all BTA was saying.

 

[VulkanBros]

Damn #﷼"~…@ .... just bought the Crosshair IV Formula ....... Grrrrr......crap

 

[CDdude55]

Damn #﷼"~…@ .... just bought the Crosshair IV Formula ....... Grrrrr......crap

If you're rich enough to buy that board, why not buy the Extreme and then sell your current board?

 

[btarunr]

Well then I'm confused. The way I read it is I can combine a 480 with a 5850 for some kind of hybrid GPU setup. This could be beyond say an X58 chipset which can do Crossfire and SLI.

Am I right? If not enlighten me.

Yes, you're right. You can pair an NV card with an ATI card in mixed mode, as I mentioned in the news post.

 

[VulkanBros]

If you're rich enough to buy that board, why not buy the Extreme and then sell your current board?

Unfortunately I am not rich...I had to sell my bicycle to get the Formula....

 

[theonedub]

The Crosshair IV Extreme makes use of the Lucid Hydra engine, with a 32-lane Hydra bridge chip that supports 3~4 graphics cards. While the AMD 890FX isn't deficient of PCI-Express lanes, the addition of Hydra gives the motherboard the unique ability to mix and match graphics cards, with special modes for pairing ATI GPUs (A Mode), NVIDIA GPUs (N Mode), and ATI NVIDIA GPUs (Mixed Mode).

Neither A or N modes use SLI or Xfire Tech to coordinate between the 2(+) cards, its all Lucid's own design and implementation.

 

[Bjorn_Of_Iceland]

so how is hydra anyway? Is it driver hell?

 

[Sihastru]

At this time it's like this: SLI > CFX > Hydra modes.

The future of Hydra is not very certain, their drivers aren't that good yet, they made promises they didn't fully fulfilled. Scaling in most situations is ok-ish to bad. In some (few, but they exist) situations you don't even get the performance of one card.

So I would stay away from them for now, unless you have money to blow on experiments.

The best option for multi GPU setups in the market is X58. If you're just into CFX, you can get away with an AMD board. But I like to have options.

 

[TheMailMan78]

My confusion was in the terminology.

You are right they cannot do crossfire or SLI but a Lucid version of the two. Thanks BTA and theonedub.

My weapons grade stupid is explosive.

 

[cheezburger]

never expecting asus would make something serious like this board on amd platform......

 

[Wile E]

Can you bypass Hydra driver installation, and just use standard Crossfire for 2 ATI cards?

And what is their scaling in N mode like? Can this bring a near SLI experience to the AMD chipset?

 

[WarEagleAU]

Do want finally it has come out. Wish they would have kept the one pci-e x1 slot they had. I think this will be in intels echelon of pricing on high end boards, like 350 or so.

 

[TheMailMan78]

Can you bypass Hydra driver installation, and just use standard Crossfire for 2 ATI cards?

And what is their scaling in N mode like? Can this bring a near SLI experience to the AMD chipset?

W1zz needs to review one of these Hydras already.

 

[burebista]

If you have patience to go through Google translate you can see a review from my friends here. Original article in Romanian.
This is the first part. Second part will be about LucidLogix Hydra 200 and SLI/Crossfire configurations.