ASUS Crosshair II Formula

Josh Collins scopes up to suss out the latest from ASUS, AMD and NVIDIA.

Coming 18 months after the last R.O.G. AMD platform, the Crosshair II Formula picks up where the original Crosshair left off. It’s not all that surprising, though we often think of the IT industry as fast moving, that so much time has passed between releases.

The reason for the time lapse between the two boards is due mainly to the ‘Crosshair’ moniker being attached to NVIDIA chipsets for AMD. The original Crosshair was based on the nForce 590 chipset; the next release from the nForce range for the AMD platform was a rather failed one – this was the prosaic 680a chipset. This chipset only saw the light of day via the ASUS L1N64-SLI WS and could only utilise the Socket L1-based FX-70, FX-72 and FX-74 processors. Unfortunately these processors offered underwhelming performance and a faux quad-core solution by way of a dual-core DP setup more akin to an Opteron-based DP server than a desktop system.

With little product support from any direction, the 680a was a flop. This time around, it’s back to a single socket, AM2+ based solution, based around the nForce 780a SPP and MCP. With support for Phenom X4 quad-core processors, no special sockets, no special processors and no one-of-a-kind expensive motherboards, the new chipset may just be up to the task of making some sort of penetration into the desktop market.

The 780a chipset found at the heart of the Crosshair II Formula feels like a mix-and-match from the features of the 680i for Intel based systems and the functionality found in the recently released AMD 780G chipset. It supports the NVIDIA 3-Way SLI standard, albeit only with three 8x electrical PCI-Express slots rather than the full 16x found on the 780i and 790i for Intel systems. On the 780G-esque side of things, the 780a sports an integrated GPU solution. It includes a D-SUB and HDMI output; the HDMI output can be converted into a DVI connection with the bundled dongle. This setup supports a resolution up to 1920 x 1200 before requiring a dedicated graphics card to go further.

What’s funky about this integrated GPU is that it actually isn’t half bad. Using up to 512MB of memory of the system memory, the little trooper managed 11234 marks in 3DMark06 and in Crysis, with all settings set to low and a resolution of 1280 x 1024, it managed an average, minimum and maximum of 15.34, 9.41 and 21.86 respectively. While this isn’t exactly playable, it does indicate that this type of solution could be a real winner for the lowest of the low-end budget gamer just looking for that quick, cheap and nasty fix of Counter Strike in between watching high definition movies.

So, you might think, the new platform from the AMD, NVIDIA and ASUS collective isn’t looking too shabby; right up until you started tweaking the system. On our first time through the BIOS, the system allowed a number of memory dividers, the two highest of which were set for DDR2-800 and DDR2-1066. But, unfortunately, the DDR2-1066 divider could not be implemented into matter what we tried. No amount of voltage coercion could get it to stick, so we were forced to settle for DDR2-800, which meant a 1:2 divider.

We weren’t stoked, but we figured we could make do and use a CAS3-based timing set, or at least a CAS4, seeing as we run DDR2-1000 4-4-4-10 as standard on our Intel DDR2 systems. But the life of a tweaker and their system is often not an easy one. What we first got was a restriction to a CAS Latency (tCL) of four, but then the lowest values for tRCD and tRP were only 5 – ‘WTF?’ we thought. As such, you’ll note the results use memory at DDR2-800 5-5-5-15 1T.

As always, we looked for the max bus frequency and in this case we maxed out at a HTT (FSB for the Intel peeps) of 263MHz – a sweet 63MHz gain.

Oddly, after having found the max HTT, and having a play at 250MHz HTT, the memory timings magically unlocked and a full set of CAS3- and CAS4-based timings were available. The catch, we soon found, was that none of them would actually work properly. Instead, what would happen is the settings would corrupt the hell out of the OS and ultimately render the system in need of a reformat – not ideal!

We like this board. We really do. To be honest, we’d like to love it – it’s such a unique little performer. But until those glaring memory issues are solved it can only be good, not brilliant.