CPUs & Motherboards

ASUS Crosshair V Formula Review

vortez
November 13, 2012 17 Min Read
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It’s time for the fifth iteration of the Crosshair series of motherboards from ASUS, based on the AMD 990FX chipset. Will it claim the performance crown?


Product on Review: ASUS Crosshair V Formula
Manufacturer and Sponsor: ASUS
Street price: ~£170 inc. VAT (At time of review)

The ASUS Crosshair V Formula is a part of ASUS’ ROG line of products. It comes feature packed and loaded with accessories for whatever you may require. The ROG product line is considered the crème de la crème of ASUS products. They are built for the enthusiast and the (extreme) overclockers.

The Crosshair V Formula has four PCIe x16 lanes (the bottom slot runs at x4) although due to the way that they are layed out, only tri-SLI or CrossFireX is supported. Dual x16 lanes are available for dual graphics cards or x16/x8/x8 will be used when you use three cards.

Some of you may be wondering why you would drop £170 on an AMD motherboard and a AMD FX CPU when they perform so poorly compared to Intels offerings such as the Core i5, which is faster in every respect. Even if the software is programmed to use all eight cores efficiently, the Core i5 will be better off. It also uses a vast amount of energy and generates plenty of heat. The Core i5 system is in an entirely different league in every respect and it makes it very difficult to justify such a purchase.



The ASUS ROG is a division of their branding which is aimed at the enthusiasts and (extreme) overclockers. The ROG line is and always has been feature packed but you definitely pay the price for the parts. The Crosshair V Formula supports all of AMDs AM3 and AM3+ processors once the BIOS has been updated. Full suuport for 3-way SLI or CrossFire and plenty of connections at the IO for all of your peripheral requirements. It also features a Intel LAN controller which should give you that extra performance over a cheaper component, albeit a small difference.

Features


CPU
AMD AM3+ FX™/Phenom™ II/Athlon™ II/Sempron™ 100 Series Processors
Supports AM3+ 32 nm CPU
Supports CPU up to 8 cores
Supports CPU up to 140 W
AMD Cool ‘n’ Quiet™ Technology

Chipset
AMD 990FX/SB950

Memory
4 x DIMM, Max. 32GB, DDR3 2133(O.C.)/1866/1600/1333/1066 MHz ECC, Non-ECC, Un-buffered Memory
Dual Channel Memory Architecture
* Refer to www.asus.com or user manual for the Memory QVL (Qualified Vendors Lists).
* Due to OS limitation, when installing total memory of 4GB capacity or more, Windows® 32-bit operation system may only recognize less than 3GB. Install a 64-bit Windows® OS when you want to install 4GB or more memory on the motherboard.

Multi-GPU Support
Supports NVIDIA® 3-Way SLI™ Technology
Supports AMD 3-Way CrossFireX™ Technology

Expansion Slots
3 x PCIe 2.0 x16 (dual x16 or x16/x8/x8)
1 x PCIe 2.0 x16 (x4 mode)
1 x PCIe 2.0 x1
1 x PCI

Storage
AMD SB950 controller
6 x SATA 6Gb/s port(s), red
Support Raid 0, 1, 5, 10
ASMedia® ASM1061 controller
1 x SATA 6Gb/s port(s), red
1 x eSATA 6Gb/s port(s), red

LAN
Intel®, 1 x Gigabit LAN Controller(s)

Audio
SupremeFX X-Fi 2 built-in 8-Channel High Definition Audio CODEC
– Supports : Jack-detection, Multi-streaming, Front Panel Jack-retasking
Audio Feature :
– X-Fi® Xtreme Fidelity™
– EAX® Advanced™ HD 5.0
– THX® TruStudio PRO™
– Creative ALchemy
– Blu-ray audio layer Content Protection
– Optical S/PDIF out port(s) at back panel

USB Ports
ASMedia® USB 3.0 controller :
6 x USB 3.0 port(s) (4 at back panel, blue, 2 at mid-board)

AMD SB950 controller
12 x USB 2.0 port(s) (8 at back panel, black+white, 4 at mid-board)

Overclocking Features
ROG Connect :
– RC Diagram
– RC Remote
– RC Poster
– GPU TweakIt

Extreme Engine Digi+
– 8 + 2 phase power design

UEFI BIOS features
– ROG BIOS Print
– GPU.DIMM Post
GameFirst
iROG
Extreme Tweaker

Overclocking Protection
– COP EX (Component Overheat Protection – EX)
– Voltiminder LED
– ASUS C.P.R.(CPU Parameter Recall)

Special Features
ASUS TPU
– CPU Level Up
Core Unlocker

ASUS Exclusive Features
– MemOK!
– Ai Charger+

ASUS Quiet Thermal Solution
– ASUS Fan Xpert

ASUS EZ DIY
– ASUS Q-Shield
– ASUS O.C. Profile
– ASUS EZ Flash 2
– ASUS MyLogo 3

ASUS Q-Design
– ASUS Q-LED (CPU, DRAM, VGA, Boot Device LED)
– ASUS Q-Connector

Back I/O Ports
1 x PS/2 keyboard/mouse combo port(s)
1 x eSATA 6Gb/s
1 x LAN (RJ45) port(s)
4 x USB 3.0
8 x USB 2.0 (one port can be switched to ROG Connect)
1 x Optical S/PDIF out
6 x Audio jack(s)
1 x Clear CMOS button(s)

Internal I/O Ports
1 x USB 3.0 connector(s) support(s) additional 2 USB 3.0 port(s)
2 x USB 2.0 connector(s) support(s) additional 4 USB 2.0 port(s)
7 x SATA 6Gb/s connector(s)
2 x CPU Fan connector(s)
3 x Chassis Fan connector(s)
3 x Optional Fan connector(s)
1 x S/PDIF out header(s)
1 x 24-pin EATX Power connector(s)
1 x 8-pin ATX 12V Power connector(s)
1 x 4-pin ATX 12V Power connector(s)
1 x Front panel audio connector(s) (AAFP)
1 x System panel(s)
8 x ProbeIt Measurement Points
3 x Thermal sensor connector(s)
1 x En/Dis-able Clr CMOS header(s)
1 x EZ Plug connector(s) (4-pin Molex power connector)
1 x Power-on button(s)
1 x Reset button(s)
1 x CPU Level Up button(s)
1 x ROG Connect switch(es)
1 x Go Button(s)

Accessories
User’s manual
I/O Shield
6 x SATA 6Gb/s cable(s)
1 x 3-Way SLI bridge(s)
1 x SLI bridge(s)
1 x CrossFire cable(s)
1 x Q-connector(s) (2 in 1)
1 x ROG Connect cable(s)
1 x Cable ties pack(s)
1 x ROG theme label(s)
1 x 12 in 1 ROG Cable Label(s)

BIOS
32Mb Flash ROM, UEFI BIOS, PnP, DMI2.0, WfM2.0, SM BIOS 2.5, ACPI2.0a, Multi-Language BIOS
Manageability WOL by PME, WOR by PME, PXE

Support Disc
Drivers
Sound Blaster® X-Fi 2 Utility
Kaspersky® Anti-Virus
DAEMON Tools Pro Standard
ROG CPU-Z
ASUS Utilities

Form Factor
ATX Form Factor
12 inch x 9.6 inch ( 30.5 cm x 24.4 cm )

Packaging & Accessories


The motherboard box is a simple, yet stylish design. There is no fancy boasting of the product on the front box. However, they boast their product in a slightly different manor. The front of the box flips open to reveal the motherboard and its features on the back of the cover. The image in the bottom right-hand corner is the same image of a sticker which you get with this motherboard to stick to wherever you may please, should you wish to do so.



Lifting up the front cover gives us a first look at the motherboard and a list of some features which are present on the motherboard.



Opening up the box, we get our first look at the two internal compartments of the full motherboard box. The motherboard and accessories each come in their own box as you can see below. This is something which I have always liked about the ROG line up from ASUS.



On the back side of the box, we have a list of some more of the features on this board such as the UEFI, the SupremeFX audio chip and lots more.



Inside the box we are given the following accessories:

• 1x ROG Connect cable
• 1x CrossFire bridge
• 1x SLI flexi bridge
• 6x SATA 6Gbps cables
• 1x USB to USB cable for iROG Connect
• 1x 2-in-1 ASUS Q-Connector kit
• 1x 3-Way SLI bridge
• 1x Cable ties pack
• 1x ROG theme label
• 1x 12-in-1 ROG SATA cable label
• 1x I/O shield
• 1x User manual
• 1x ROG motherboard support DVD


Our review sample is missing a couple of things from the accessories box which is why they are not in the image unfortunately.



A Closer Look


The ASUS Crosshair V Formula is a part of the ROG line so that entails it carries the colours of the ROG branding too. The black PCB with black and red slots is a rather eye catching colour scheme. The heatsinks match this colour scheme too. Whilst ASUS are not the only manufacturer to implement the black and red colours as EVGA are known for this too.



The voltage delivery for your CPU is taken care of by an 8+2 power design. The 8-pin EPS/CPU power is located in the top left corner of the motherboard, above and to the side of the heatsinks. There is an additional 4pin CPU power to the right of the top VRM heatsinks if you are overclocking to extreme levels and you want to feed your CPU more power.

It should be noted that that our Noctua NH-D14s heatpipes do come into contact with the heatsink on the Northbridge but it is literally only just touching. The NH-D14 is one of the biggest air coolers out there on the market today so you should not have any issues with other coolers.



There is a myriad of features around the DIMM slots. Four PWM fan headers are available for use (one is for the CPU FAN) and directly above the slots are voltage read points for the various components in your system. They include the CPU, CPU VDDA, DRAM, NB, HT, SB and CPUNB voltages as well as two ground points. The USB 3.0 header is located to the bottom right-hand-side of the RAM slots. The RAM features a two phase design for its power delivery. Finally, we have the ASUS GO button. This is something which you can use to define an overclock within the BIOS to load when you enter your OS. This may be useful for those who use this board for extreme overclocking. It allows you to boot at lower, more stable speeds and then it gives you that speed boost when you need it for the all important screenshot moment.



There are seven internal SATA 6Gbps ports on this motherboard. Six of them are controlled by the chipset, and the other two are controlled by the ASMedia ASM1061 controller. The six ports controlled via the chipset are all RAID capable and they allow you to use either RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10. The ASMedia controller takes care of the one extra internal port as well as the eSATA port at the back.



Out of the four PCIe x16 lanes, three of them can be used for either a dual or triple GPU setup. The fourth PCIe x16 lane is limited to x4. With the way that the slots are put on the motherboard, it is not possible to have any additional cards with a triple card configuration. There is only one PCIe x1 slot which is covered when you use a GPU in the primary slot that is features a dual slot cooler, which is pretty much every card today.

Below the PCIe lanes, we have three buttons which are consist of the OC, START and RESET buttons. They do exactly what they say. Pressing the OC button will give your system an automated overclock. Pressing the START button will turn your system on as if you pressed the power button at the front of your case and the RESET button is the same story. There are the usual USB 2.0 headers located around the bottom of the board as well as two PWM fan headers and



On the back of the board, we have a vast number of connections available. Starting from left and working our way towards the right, we have a PS2 port and two USB 3.0 ports. We then have a Clear CMOS button which makes it easier for you to clear your CMOS if you have already installed your motherboard into a case. Two USB 2.0 ports and the eSATA 6Gbps port are next in line, followed by an optical S/PDIF port and another two USB 3.0 ports. The LAN port, which is controlled by an Intel controller, is next in line with another six USB 2.0 ports. One of which, the white one to be more specific, is used for ROG Connect but it performs as a normal USB 2.0 port if it is not connected for ROG Connect. Last of all, we have the six audio ports which are powered by the Supreme-FX X-Fi sound card.

Test Setup & Benchmarks


AMD Bulldozer FX-8120 Test Bench
CPU – AMD FX-8120 Eight-Core Processor
Cooling – Noctua NH-D14
Motherboard – ASUS M5A99X EVO
Memory – G.SKILL RipJawX DDR3-1866MHz CL9
Graphics – ZOTAC GTX 570 1280MB
Storage – Corsair Force F120
PSU – FSP Aurum CM Series 750W 80PLUS Gold


Before we start any overclocking, we will be setting the BIOS to the following defaults before beginning any overclocking.

Overclocking Settings
CPU Multiplier – 13.5x
RAM speed – 1066MHz
CPU/NB and HT Links – 1600MHz (8x CPU bus)


As with all of our AMD Bulldozer reviews, we will be running the following benchmark suite to give you a variety of results:

AIDA64 – CPU benchmarks
X264 HD 5.0.1 – 1st and 2nd pass encoding
SiSoftware Sandra 2012 – CPU and Memory benchmarks
CineBench 11.5 – CPU score
3DMark 11 – DX11 3D Performance and Extreme preset
Games – Crysis 2, DiRT Showdown, Skyrim and Sleeping Dogs

Overclocking


The ASUS Crosshair V Formula is oriented towards the enthusiasts and therefore comes loaded with possibly every setting you may need to get the utmost amount of performance out of your system. For the most part, most of us would never have to change any of these settings from their “auto” values but to the extreme enthusiasts, they may come in useful to squeeze every last MHz out of the CPU.

During the overclocking, we will be testing the following:

Default speeds
We will be using the BIOS defaults to see how the motherboard manufacturer has configured their BIOS for comparison reasons.

Maximum CPU bus overclocking
This is tested to show you which motherboard can take your CPU to the highest bus speed and hold it there. This is not strictly for 24/7 use, it is just to set the benchmark to compare motherboards against each other.


As the Crosshair V Formula is aimed at the enthusiast and overclocker alike, and with a reputation for overclocking that has been built up over the years of the ROG line up to live up to; will this motherboard live up to the hype? Lets crack on with the overclocking.

Just like any other motherboard review on the AMD 990 chipset, we will be using the same settings in order to keep it as fair as possible in every respect. We already know that in our review of the ASUS M5A99X EVO, which took our CPU sample up to 335MHz on the CPU bus, that this motherboard will have a pretty tough time besting it.

We had no issues pushing this CPU to its limits with minimal effort. Although it was unable to reach the target set by the M5A99X EVO, it still did well for itself and as you will see in the benchmark results, it actually performs better than the EVO at a slightly slower clock speed.

When the occasional ‘we pushed it too far’ moment occured, the board had no issues in recovering itself from the mistakes. Although it does reset the BIOS to manufacturer defaults, as with any other motherboard, it does remember your settings which you attempted to use in a previously failed overclock so that you can easily go back and tweak it, and try again.

In the end, the final clock speed which we were able to get out of the Crosshair V Formula was 4469MHz (331 x 13.5) which equates to roughly a 44% overclock on the final clock speed and a 65% increase on the CPU bus.


Benchmarks: AIDA64


This simple integer benchmark focuses on the branch prediction capabilities and the misprediction penalties of the CPU. It finds the solutions for the classic “Queens problem” on a 10 by 10 sized chessboard. At the same clock speed theoretically the processor with the shorter pipeline and smaller misprediction penalties will attain higher benchmark scores. For example – with HyperThreading disabled – the Intel Northwood core processors get higher scores than the Intel Prescott core based ones due to the 20-step vs. 31-step long pipeline. The CPU Queen test uses integer MMX, SSE2 and SSSE3 optimizations.








Benchmarks: CINEBENCH 11.5


CINEBENCH can measure systems with up to 64 processor threads. This test scene contains approximately 2,000 objects which in turn contain more than 300,000 polygons in total, and uses sharp and blurred reflections, area lights, shadows, procedural shaders, antialiasing, and much more. The result is displayed in points (pts). The higher the number, the faster your processor is.


Benchmarks: SiSoftware SANDRA 2012


SANDRA isn’t always a benchmark that is included in hardware reviews but we believe it shouldn’t be ignored. SANDRA provides a vigorous package that tests your system in a rather large array of benchmarks. There are many aspects of benchmark that can be executed. We will be considering the CPU and memory tests.












Benchmarks: x264 HD 5.0.1


Simply put, this test measures how fast your machine can encode a short, DVD quality MPEG-2 video clip into a high-quality x264 video clip. What’s x264, you ask? It’s more or less the next-generation Xvid/DivX codec. We think it’s ideal for a benchmark because the application (x264.exe) reports fairly accurate compression results (in frames per second) for each pass of the video encoding process and it uses multi-core processors very efficiently.





3D Benchmarks: 3DMark 11


Designed to measure your PC’s gaming performance 3DMark 11 makes extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading. Trusted by gamers worldwide to give accurate and unbiased results, 3DMark 11 is the best way to consistently and reliably test DirectX 11 under game-like loads.




3D Benchmarks: Unigine Heaven 3.0


Unigine’s benchmark is to showcase the benefits of DX 11 and the use of tessellation as opposed to normal rendering techniques. The demo has impressive visuals that give an insight into what we can expect from gaming in the future.








Gaming Benchmarks: Crysis 2 & DiRT Showdown


It’s important for us to perform a number of game benchmarks as well as the synthetic tests because it allows us to test the 3D performance. So here we have some popular titles, critically acclaimed and action-packed. FRAPS and in-house benchmarking tools were used to capture average FPS.




Gaming Benchmarks: Skyrim & SleepingDogs


It’s important for us to perform a number of game benchmarks as well as the synthetic tests because it allows us to test the 3D performance. So here we have some popular titles, critically acclaimed and action-packed. FRAPS and in-house benchmarking tools were used to capture average FPS.




Conclusion


The ASUS Crosshair V Formula certainly is not cheap but if you want the some of the best hardware on the market for an AMD system, you should not look any further. It performs well but at almost twice the cost of the ASUS M5A99X EVO, is it really worth it? Perhaps, if you were looking for an extreme solution to push your CPU to the absolute limit on extreme cooling methods such as liquid nitrogen. If you are not, it is difficult to justify such a purchase.

Even though we were not able to get the same results out of the motherboard in terms of overclocking the CPU bus when we compare it to the ASUS M5A99X EVO, it actually performed better in a number of our benchmarks.

The UEFI BIOS is in a typical ASUS layout, with a few subtle differences. The overclocking tab is the first tab that opens as soon as you enter the advanced mode. There are numerous voltage controls in there which you can tweak to absolutely no end if you wish to do so. The other obvious change is the colour scheme. The colours are red and black, to match the ROG style.



When it comes down to presentation, the ASUS Crosshair V Formula certainly puts on a good show. The eye catching red and black design just looks like the business.

To sum all of our thoughts up and perhaps most importantly, should you buy this motherboard? Well, it is difficult to say. Sure, from what we have tested thus far, nothing can touch this motherboard in terms of performance but at a price of ~£170, plus the cost of a processor, you are looking at a inferior system when you compare it to a similar valued Intel system.

Whilst the ASUS Crosshair V Formula does claim the performance crown, the price is what is stopping us from giving this a golden award. You are paying a premium for the Republic of Gamers branding and the premium components onboard.

Pros
+ Great overclocking ability
+ A myriad of features
+ Very stable, even at highly overclocked speeds
+ Well layed out

Cons
– Costly


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