ASUS Crosshair IV Extreme Combines AMD and NVIDIA Graphics

For many years, consumers may have been dreaming of a time when they would be able to merge the graphics capabilities of both ATI and NVIDIA cards into one glorious system. However, this dream remained quite out of reach, until LucidLogix created the Hydra 200 SoC and MSI used it on its Big Bang Fuzion enthusiast motherboard. Now, it seems that competitiveness has finally made its mark even in this area, as ASUS is getting ready to officially launch the ROG Crosshair IV Extreme platform.

Both ATI's Crossfire and NVIDIA's SLI configurations are very restrictive. They can only be set up between graphics cards from the same manufacturer and said cards must be of the same model. Lucid's Hydra 200 system-on-chip removes these limitations completely. Consumers are still able to use either multiple NVIDIA or multiple ATI cards, but they can also employ both types at once. This is quite interesting, especially on a motherboard that can fit up to five distinct adapters.

The Crosshair IV Extreme is based on the high-end 890FX chipset from Advanced Micro Devices and, as such, supports powerful AM3 central processing units, including six-core Thuban chips. This, of course, would be expected of any Republic of Gamers platform. Other specifications include four DDR3 memory slots, nine SATA ports (some of which are SATA 6.0Gbps), five PCI Express x16 slots, 7.1 channel audio and Gigabit Ethernet.

One of the ASUS-exclusive technologies that Republic of Gamers motherboards have started to be designed with is the ROG Connect. Essentially, this is a feature that allows end-users to overclock their system via Bluetooth and is present on this model as well. Unfortunately, the company did not disclose when this beast would start selling, nor at what price, although it can be assumed that it won't be lower than 200 Euro.