We've been teased before with shots of ASUS's upcoming flagship AM3 motherboard, the ROG Crosshair IV Extreme, but now it's finally been made official. Featuring the latest AMD chipset, Lucid's HydraLogix chip for four-way mixed-GPU configurations and the ability to wirelessly overclock from an iPhone, the board certainly seems like it might be able to live up to the 'extreme' name.
The EATX motherboard is powered by the top-of-the-line 890FX chipset, providing two full 16-lane PCIe 2.0 slots for high-powered CrossFireX configurations.
However, the real magic comes from the inclusion of the HydraLogix chip - the first time that ASUS has added this to one of its boards. This will allow users to combine up to four graphics-cards from any vendor seamlessly into a powerful multi-GPU rig.
In case that wasn't enough expansion, there's also a fifth PCIe x16 slot and a single PCI slot. In addition, the board supports SATA 6Gb/s and USB 3.0, as well as having Bluetooth 2.1 built right onto the board.
It's not often that a desktop motherboard gets integrated Bluetooth, but this is reserved for something a little special. As well as support for ROG connect - which allows hardware overclocking using a notebook attached via USB - the Crosshair IV Extreme supports RC Bluetooth and ROG iDirect. While the former allows settings to be tweaked from any Bluetooth-enabled device, the latter pulls detailed settings and data to a specially designed iPhone app.
When it comes to AMD motherboards, there aren't many that are better equipped than the Crosshair IV Extreme. ASUS hasn't released any specifics on pricing or availability, but we're expecting details very soon.
