Nvidia 780a Chipset Preview
Asus Crosshair II Board & Specs
Published: 9th May 2008 | Source: Nvidia | Price: N/A |
Asus Crosshair II
The board we will be conducting our preliminary tests with is the Asus Crosshair II. While this is not a full review of the board (full in-depth review to come later) it should be enough to give us a little insight into the new offering from NVIDIA.
The mainboard is part of the ROG (Republic Of Gamers) series and as such represents the high end release from Asus. The traditional white and blue slots on a black PCB are carried over from other ROG boards and as you can see the 780a chip immediately below the CPU socket has a large heatsink which is possibly an indication of the heat output of Nvidia's MCP. With 3 PCIe 16x ports it is clear that this board is aimed squarely at gamers who wish to make use of SLI configurations. What is interesting is the heatsink covering the mosfet area. Rather than surround the CPU socket with restrictive copper sinks Asus have crammed them all to one side providing a cleaner socket area for those who wish to use larger CPU heatsinks. A key feature of the Crosshair II is the implementation of 10 (8 for the CPU, 2 for the memory and HT controller) phase power regulation which should provide a more stable power delivery and filtering setup.
Sound is delivered using a riser card, the SupremeFX II which is now commonplace among the ROG range of motherboards and while not exactly on par with Asus's own Xonar cards or indeed Creative's X-FI it its more than adequate should you not have or desire to use your own audio card.
Contents are as per usual Asus standards, providing everything needed to get you up and running in no time at all. The LCD Poster (above right) is a handy little gadget that allows you to troubleshoot booting problems should they occur.
Most Recent Comments
Some of the chipsets with onboard GPU's out now are really worth looking at when you consider HTPC's
Full HD output ftw tbh
.I was socked about the onboard VGA actually being able to run games let alone be playable.
Looks like a nice board.
.Tis a very nice board, I just wish we could have exploited it more....but that comes later
. i shall give it a full read when i return homegood to see asus havent abandoned AMD, and neither has Nvidia, back in the day they made some good boards, like mine, the A8N sli-premium
Asus board
Nforce 4 chipset
AMD processor
tis the shizz
good to see we're building back upto that
amd processors were never really good overclockers anyway, you were lucky if you got 500MHz out of your athlon 64 series....
I do hope AMD can get back inline with Intel as the support is evidently still there for enthusiasts with chipsets/motherboards like this.
You going to be doing more reviews webbo?
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Originally Posted by name='teknokid'
yeah, tis looking good
You going to be doing more reviews webbo? |
:whack::banng:
:haha:Did you get my pm kemp?
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Originally Posted by name='ionicle'
nice
good to see asus havent abandoned AMD, and neither has Nvidia, back in the day they made some good boards, like mine, the A8N sli-premium |
This new 780a chip looks packed with features, great (pre)review. The layout of the asus board looks spot on aswell.
1. The Price!
2. Current AMD processors.
Why pay £140+ for a motherboard that uses current AMD processors? When you could spend £140+ on an X48 board and get an Intel processor that is better than current AMDs. Who would buy a £140+ motherboard just for the onboard graphics and hybrid SLI when they would be combined with an AMD processor?
Spot on, cept DFI Lanparty SLI-DR, X2, 3gig DDR500Asus board
Nforce 4 chipset
AMD processor
tis the shizz
Im glad there will be another reiview on this board though. To really put it through its paces you need to test the tri-SLI capability, Quad-SLI, and have a Phenom 9850X4 BE. Also testing hybrid SLI to see how well that works and to see if there really is a dip in performance with it enabled.
For a (not so) little preview i thought this was great. Keep up the good work! And sorry ima bit late. This is the board im looking at getting in the near future so i wanna see the OC3D seal of approval before i decide on heading to Intel. (Which is going to be exspensive for me, QX9650, DDR3, 790i, ect)
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Review HERE