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Asus Crosshair II Formula motherboard review

Published June 20, 2008
By Steven Walton

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General Performance

Hardware
- Intel Core 2 Quad Q9450 (2.66GHz) LGA775
- AMD Phenom X4 9850 (2.50GHz) AM2+

- x2 Kingston HyperX 2GB PC2-8500 Module(s)

- ASUS M3A32-MVP Deluxe (AMD 790FX)
- ASUS Crosshair II Formula (Nvidia nForce 780a SLI)
- ASUS P5Q Deluxe (Intel P45)

- OCZ GameXStream (700 watt)

- Seagate 500GB 7200RPM (Serial ATA II)

- ASUS GeForce 9800 GTX (512MB)

Software
- Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate (64-bit)
- Nvidia Forceware (174.74)
- Intel System Drivers (8.4.0)

First up we have compared the SATA hard drive performance of these three motherboards using PCmark Vantage, and as you can see all three configurations delivered very similar results despite the different configurations.

This next batch of results also looks at SATA performance as well as USB 2.0 performance using SiSoftware Sandra XII. Once again, despite using different chipsets and processors, the three motherboards produced the same SATA result. Furthermore all three boards were able to max out the USB 2.0 bus, reaching just over 30MB/s using a high speed memory stick.

The ASUS M3A32-MVP Deluxe features one PCI Express network controller, while the PQ5 Deluxe features PCI and PCI Express network controllers. The Crosshair II Formula on the other hand makes use of dual PCI Express controllers for maximum performance.