Asus Crosshair V Formula Review

Testing Methods

With the exception of ATTO, which we use to measure the performance of a motherboard's SATA controllers, all of our benchmarks use real applications that give you a great idea of how well a product fares when performing the tasks for which you're likely to use it.

We test with our own Media Benchmarks suite, which can be downloaded so that you can test your own system. It uses a combination of Gimp image editing, H.264 encoding with Handbrake and multi-tasking with 7-Zip file compression combined with HD video playback. Finally, for our game testing we benchmark the board running Arma II, and record the minimum and average frame rates.

Our benchmarks include stable overclocked results too, so you can gauge how much performance potential there is in the motherboard, and how much value this adds to your purchase.

Test Setup:

Motherboards:

• Asus Crosshair V Formula (AMD 990FX)
  
• Gigabyte 990FXA-UD7 (AMD 990FX)
  
• ASRock 890FX Deluxe 5 (AMD 890FX)
  
• MSI 990FXA-GD80 (AMD 990FX)

Common Components:

• 3.3GHz AMD Phenom II X6 1100T Black Edition CPU
  
• 4GB 1,600MHz DDR3 CL8 memory
  
• Western Digital Caviar Black 2TB SATA hard disk
  
• Nvidia GeForce GTX 590 3GB graphics card
  
• PC Power and Cooling Silencer 750W PSU
  
• Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
  
• GeForce 275.33 WHQL

Overclocked Settings:

• Asus Crosshair V Formula - 4.14GHz: 345MHz HTT x 12
  
• Gigabyte 990FXA-UD7 - 3.95GHz: 305MHz HTT x 13
  
• ASRock 890FX Deluxe 5 - 4.13GHz: 295MHz HTT x 14
  
• MSI 990FXA-GD80 - 4.2GHz: 247MHz HTT x 17