Asus Crosshair V Formula Review

Performance Analysis

The Crosshair V wasn’t especially fast in our Media Benchmarks at its stock speed, recording a mediocre overall score of 1,383. However, it recorded the best performance in Arma II, with a minimum frame rate of 64fps. Its SATA speeds were excellent too; it recorded a read speed of 549MB/sec and a write speed of 467MB/sec – the former is just about the maximum we would expect to see from the OCZ Vertex 3 SSD.

The ASMedia 106x controller proved to be far less capable than the SB950 Southbridge, though, only managing a read speed of 404MB/sec and a write speed of 347MB/sec – no prizes for guessing the ports we recommend using if you own a SATA 6Gbps SSD.

Overclocking the Crosshair V was also a far more pleasant experience than it was with the equivalent ASRock and MSI motherboards we’ve tested. Annoyingly, it still wasn’t great at recovering from ambitious overclocks, and rarely managed this on its own, but it usually just needed a single press of the reset button to make it come alive again.


Thankfully, the Crosshair V's EFI system is the best we’ve seen on an AM3+ board to date. It was snappy and responsive, and exhibited none of the lag we saw elsewhere. As you would expect from a RoG board, the EFI was also well laid out and included a wealth of options in the overclocking department.

In the end, the board managed a stable maximum HTT of 350MHz, which required boosting the CPU NB to 1.262V, the NB and HTT to 1.31V and the SB to 1.33V. This is the highest HTT we’ve seen so far from an AM3+ motherboard.

The Crosshair V also outshone the competition with its ability to maintain its high HTT speed when we ramped up the CPU multiplier for a final overclock. Using a vcore of 1.5V, we were able to use an HTT of 345MHz and a CPU multiplier of 12x to reach a CPU frequency of 4.14GHz.


This saw the Crosshair V record the fastest image editing and video encoding scores we've seen from an AM3+ motherboard - 1,271 and 2,464 respectively. However, the multi-tasking and overall scores weren’t the highest we’ve seen, being slightly eclipsed by the ASRock 890FX Deluxe 5, which we tested for comparative purposes. Arma II also received a shot in the arm, with the Crosshair V’s overclocked minimum frame rate of 71fps again being the best we’ve seen.

Conclusion

The Crosshair V Formula is fast, easy to overclock, and laden with useful features. That said, it's clearly geared more towards overclockers than gamers, and a cheaper board can produce similar results and leave you with more cash to spend on a faster graphics card.

However, none of the other motherboards we’ve tested can boast such superb SATA performance, easy overclocking and an abundance of features. Only its high price means that it falls short of an unequivocal recommendation.