ASUS ALERT: Brand new Republic of Gamers board breaks cover

As temperatures fell outside the Soho Hotel in London last night, the Asus inner circle pulled the covers back from the Crosshair IV Extreme. As you’d expect, KitGuru has the inside track on this exciting new development!

While the X58 chipset consumer has been able to choose easily between CrossFire and SLi, the options have been more limited for AMD processor lovers who wanted GTX action from nVidia. The Asus Crosshare IV Extreme gives you that choice, through the power of the Lucid Hydra chip.

You can now mix and match ATI and nVidia cards, while clocking your Phenom II X6 chips as far as their Global Foundry cores will take them.

These boards look gorgeous as well. Asus is keen to show off the fact that not only do the hardware engineering and BIOS teams excel at design – the products stand out a mile in any system build.

That attention to design has carried forward to the software design team, who have created a neat applet for smartphones which allows you to control your monster clocks remotely via Bluetooth. Joseph Wu, Asus design guru, said “It's time to try, on-the-fly, overclocking on your Smart Phone now.”

Asus is using the term TPU for its Turbo Processing Units [Wonder if it will catch on? – Ed] and the initial test data is very attractive (times in seconds – lower is better):-

	TURBO UNLOCKER
	OFF	ON	BOOST
Super Pi (1M)	22.23	19.93	10.32%
Wprime (32M)	25.02	21.96	12.22%
Cinebench	6978	7801	11.79%

While we all like to think that overclocking performance is purely the domain of the KitGuru enthusiast, it's nice to see a company the size of Asus giving users a ‘press the button for another 12%' option.

Iain Bristow, Asus Marketing Guru said “Our TPU is really smart and gives a turbo boost of up to 500% on single threaded applications. Perfect for file compression. The really cool thing is that your chip stays within defined TDP and electrical limits”

We reserve a special smile for the new board’s ability to take FOUR FAT GRAPHICS. Nice to see lard-arse GPUs being catered for in such comfort!

KitGuru says: Can’t wait to get hands on with this board in our labs. Just dying to put a low-fat-skinny-latte Radeon HD 5350 next to a FatBoi GTX490 and seeing if there’s anything left once the GeForce has rolled onto the ATI side of the bed.

Discuss in our forum over here or leave a quick comment below.

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