Asus Crosshair V Formula Motherboard Review

Today we are using the AMD Phenom II X6 1090T Black Edition processor to test the Crosshair V Formula motherboard.

Test System

Processor: AMD Phenom II X6 1090T
Motherboard: Asus Crosshair V Formula
Cooler: Be Quiet Dark Rock Pro
Memory: 4GB (2x 2GB) Kingston HyperX Genesis 1600MHz
Graphics Card: AMD Radeon HD 6950
Power Supply: Thermaltake ToughPower XT 750W
Optical Drive: Samsung B083L Blu-Ray Drive
Chassis: Corsair Obsidian 650D
Monitors: Viewsonic VX2260WM
Boot Drive: Intel 320 Series 160 GB
Secondary Drive: OCZ Vertex 3 MAX IOPS 240 GB (For CrystalDiskMark)

Software

Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit)
FRAPS Professional
SiSoft Sandra 2011 SP3
CPUz
GPUz
CPUID Hardware Monitor
Cinebench R11.5 (64-bit)
Cyberlink PowerDVD 11 Ultra
Cyberlink MediaEspresso 6.5
CrystalDiskMark
3DMark 11
PCMark 7
VLC Media Player
Performance Monitor

Games

DiRT 3
F1 2010
Grand Theft Auto IV: Episodes from Liberty City
Dead Space 2
Call of Duty Black Ops

All the latest BIOS updates and drivers are used during testing. We perform under real world conditions, meaning KitGuru tests across five closely matched runs and averages out the results to get an accurate median figure.

Overclocking

The Asus Crosshair V Formula has an automatic overclocking feature which enables users who don't have the technical knowledge or confidence to overclock their system to do so painlessly.  Using this feature we were able to achieve a clock speed of 3.7ghz which represents a 16% overclock.  This is sure to give your system a reasonable boost in performance and it takes less than a minute.

We decided to see how far we could push the system manually and achieved an impressive overclock of 4.21 GHz using a baseclock of 200MHz and a multiplier of 21x.  This was achieved using a core voltage of 1.45V.  This wasn't completely stable, though, as the system crashed after a few seconds of running a Prime95 blend test.  We tried upping the voltage to 1.475V but the system was still unstable.

So we were forced to drop the multiplier down one level to 20x, leaving the baseclock at 200Mhz, giving us a stable clock speed of 4.01 GHz, using a voltage of 1.45V.  The was completely stable under load so we used this overclock throughout our benchmarks.

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