Asus Crosshair V Formula Motherboard Review

It is no mystery that Republic of Gamers motherboards are designed with the sole intent to be used, and abused, by hardware enthusiasts.  Prior to this review we have looked at three other Asus ROG motherboards, the Rampage III Extreme, Maximus IV Extreme and Maximus IV Gene-Z.  While all of these boards share similar branding that aren't all designed alike.  For instance the R3E and M4E are both boards designed for Extreme overclocking using Intel processors and supercooling such as LN2.  The Gene-Z is also an Intel based motherboard but the a MicroATX styling and lack of enthusiast addons makes it more designed for mainstream gaming than hardcore overclocking.  Our question is, where does the Crosshair V Formula land?  Is this board an all out overclocker like the Extreme series? Or is it more reserved for the enthusiast gamer / weekend overclocker?

Based on this review and our experiences we can conclude that it falls right in the middle and takes the best of both worlds.   For instance AMD recently hosted a press showing of their new Bulldozer based FX processors and broke the overall CPU speed world record of 8.4Ghz using none other than the Crosshair V Formula.  In looking at the motherboard and comparing it to the R3E you wouldn't think it could handle a system running that fast but, it did and will likely do it again, once Bulldozer chips hit the market.

A few new features unique to the AMD 990FX chipset include 42 PCIe lanes with 32 of them being dedicated to graphics alone.  These lanes can be divided up into dual, triple and quad card configurations depending on what the manufacture decides.  In the case of the Crosshair V Extreme the motherboard will fully support three way GPU setups and doesn't leave much room for anything else.  The PCI Express slot layout is divided up so that the majority of available bandwidth is spread across the motherboard.  While this may seem strange it does allow extreme overclockers room to run dual cards with LN2 pots and still have room for insulation.
 
Overclocking on the Crosshair V was rather straight forward and once we remembered what was needed to make a Phenom clock we were off and running.  Of course a Black Edition processor helps in the tweaking process but for those of you running retail CPUs it is important that a motherboard support high HyperTransport speeds.  For our overclocking tests we could not run our system at 250HT but 225HT proved to be quite stable.

Great motherboard styling
Bulldozer Core AMD Support
3-Way Crossfire
3-Way SLI
Decent Motherboard Cooling
Support for 4 Video Cards
USB 3.0 Onboard

Had issues with high HT clocking
No bulldozer to test with (yet)