ASUS Crosshair IV Formula Motherboard

Overclocking Options

Keeping the ASUS tradition on the high-end market, Crosshair IV Formula comes with a myriad of overclocking features. First let’s talk about the hardware-based overclocking features present on this product.

As already shown in Figure 2, this board has an automatic overclocking button and, as shown in the previous page, a USB connection called ROG Connect to allow you to overclock and diagnose your system from another computer.

Crosshair IV formula has four LEDs to indicate at which range the voltages from the CPU, north bridge, south bridge and memory are at the moment. They can be in three different colors: green (normal), yellow (high) or red (crazy). On page 2-2 from the manual there are several tables showing the voltage ranges that triggers each color. On the motherboard setup you can configure which voltage each LED will be displaying. For example, you can change the CPU voltage LED to display either the CPU voltage (VDD), the memory controller voltage (VDDNB) or the CPU embedded clock generator (VDDA).

The motherboard has points for you to manually monitor voltages using a multimeter, as you can see in Figure 11. You should put the black probe on the GND pad and the red probe on the pad corresponding to the voltage you want to monitor: VDDNB1 is the voltage from the CPU embedded memory controller, SB is the voltage from the south bridge chip, HT is the voltage from the HyperTransport bus, NB is the voltage from the north bridge chip, DRAM1 is the voltage from the memory modules, CPU_PLL is the voltage from the CPU embedded clock generator (a.k.a. VDDA) and CPU1 is the voltage from the CPU (a.k.a. VDD).

Figure 11: Point for monitoring voltages.

Let’s see now the overclocking options present on the motherboard setup.