ASUS Crosshair IV Formula Motherboard
On-Board Peripherals
Contents
As explained earlier, the AMD 890FX chipset is a dual-chip solution using the SB850 south bridge chip. This chip natively supports six SATA-600 ports (with RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10) and obviously ASUS Crosshair IV Formula comes with all of them, placed on the motherboard edge rotated 90°, so video cards won’t block them, as you can see in Figure 5.
Figure 5: SATA-600 ports.
A JMicron JMB363 chip provides two additional SATA-300 ports, one near the SATA-600 ports (see Figure 5 this port in black) and one as an eSATA-300 port on the motherboard rear panel.
No parallel ATA (PATA, a.k.a. IDE) port and no floppy disk drive controller are present.
This motherboard has 12 USB 2.0 ports, seven soldered on the rear panel and five through three headers located on the motherboard. Since there is an odd number of ports on the motherboard, one header (the one labeled “USB7”) only supports one port, so pay attention to not install the cable coming from the front panel from your case on this port, otherwise one of the USB ports from your case won’t work.
This product also has two USB 3.0 ports on its rear panel (the blue ones), controlled by a NEC μPD720200 chip.
Two FireWire (IEEE1394) ports are provided, one standard-sized on the rear panel and one through a header on the motherboard. They are controlled by a VIA VT6315N.
The motherboard comes with an I/O bracket containing two USB ports and one FireWire port.
Eight-channel a
udio is generated by the chipset using a VIA VT2020 codec. Unfortunately this component isn’t listed on VIA’s website; the only information we could find out is that it presents a 110 dB signal-to-noise ratio on its outputs, which is a professional-grade number. Crosshair IV Formula comes with an on-board optical SPDIF output and you can add a coaxial SPDIF output installing an adapter on the motherboard “SPDIF_OUT” header.
The analog audio connectors are independent and gold-plated.
ASUS Crosshair IV Formula has one Gigabit Ethernet port, controlled by a Marvell 88E8059 chip, which is connected to the system using a PCI Express x1 lane and thus not presenting any potential performance issues. This particular controller incorporates features to off-load some tasks from the system CPU and thus improve networking practical performance (for example, TCP/IP and UDP checksum calculation and check and TCP segmentation, and support for IEEE 802.1QAV standard for audio video bridging, AVB, for better quality of service on real-time audio and video transmissions).
