Crosshair V Formula – Ready for AMD Bulldozer AM3+

If you’re an AMD fan then the latest ROG Crosshair motherboard will definitely be of interest, since it bleeds fresh AM3+ blood. Well, so I hear, it’s not to say I’ve seen it leak.

With AMD’s ‘Bulldozer’ CPUs hitting the streets on their new AM3+ legs, the Crosshair V Formula is designed precisely to push these new chips to the absolute limit. And we’d expect no less from the ROG team.

First things first though: can you also believe this is the FIFTH Crosshair board? That’s one a year for every year ROG has been running! And check out the change it has undergone; it still had SupremeFX, onboard switches and even the LCD Poster on the rear back then, but thankfully those orange heatsinks have all gone!

The Crosshair V Formula now follows the standard red and black trend the ROG brand has firmly settled on, with the whole board build up from a black PCB. The heatsink is actually hiding an ROG logo within its red blade, while underneath sits the Extreme Engine DIGI+ built on the DIGI+ VRM hardware that the P8-series Intel motherboards used, and the new AMD 990FX chipset.

In fact, the 8+2 phase DIGI+ VRM is not the only tech first – for AMD. ASUS has also thrown out the old BIOS and replaced it with native, true UEFI. Now it has a high-def graphical interface and native mouse support as standard. It also borrows the GPU.DIMM Post, the BIOS print mechanism and the pimp black and red color scheme from the Maximus IV Extreme too.

The Extreme Engine DIGI+ is fed by a normal 8-pin power connector, although there’s an additional 4-pin to back it up if you’re of the extreme overclocking persuasion.

The board itself is fitted with four DDR3 slots that support upwards of 1,866MHz DIMMs, four PCI-Express 16x slots (two at 16x or four at 8x), a single PCI-E 1x slot and a legacy PCI slot. Those PCI-Express slots support both SLI and CrossFire, so you’ve complete freedom to choose your multi-graphics manufacturer this generation.

Other ROG features include ROG Connect via the white USB port on the rear I/O – this can be turned on or off on via a switch on the PCB – ProbeIt area to check your voltages with a multimeter, while the Go Button next to it is a hotkey to switch overclocking settings on the fly whenever you want. The overclocked profile is saved within the UEFI BIOS and then – for example – the system can be booted at stock frequency then pumped up to OC spec once in the OS.

These features are handled by the iROG chipset just under the southbridge, while along the base of the board is the familiar power buttons and the auto overclocking CPU Level Up switch that can automatically overclock for you, if you’re not quite sure how to do it yourself.

All the SATA and eSATA ports are 6Gbps spec, while the Ethernet is from Intel for better performance vs the cheaper alternatives.

Overall there are six USB 3.0 ports – four on the rear I/O and two via a front panel pin-out and the latest SupremeFX X-FI 2 with THX TruStudio Pro is all built in.

The Crosshair V Formula also comes with the option of the ThunderBolt PCI-E combo card, that mixed a headphone amped Xonar audio with the Killer NIC NPU (network processing unit) Ethernet adapter. If you don’t need the ThunderBolt card then don’t worry because the board is available without it.

Let us know what you think of ROG’s newest AMD munching, MHz monster in the comments below.