ASUS Crosshair V Formula Motherboard

On-Board Peripherals

The AMD 990FX chipset is a two-chip solution. The south bridge chip is an SB950 chip, which is a renamed SB850. This chip supports six SATA-600 ports, supporting RAID (0, 1, 5 and 10). These ports are located on the motherboard edge rotated 90°, so video cards won’t block them. The Crosshair V Formula has one additional SATA-600 port and one eSATA-600 port, controlled by an ASMedia ASM1061 chip. There is no support for a floppy disk drive controller or an ATA-133 port.

Figure 5: SATA-600 ports

This motherboard has 12 USB 2.0 ports, eight soldered on the rear panel and four available through two headers located on the motherboard. It also has six USB 3.0 ports, controlled by three ASMedia ASM1042 chips. Four ports are located on the motherboard rear panel, and two are located on a front panel header.

The Crosshair V Formula doesn’t have FireWire (IEEE1394) ports.

This motherboard supports 7.1+2 audio format, i.e., eight channels plus two independent channels for audio streaming. On this motherboard, the audio is generated by the chipset using a Realtek ALC889 codec, which is an outstanding solution, providing an impressive 108 dB signal-to-noise ratio for the analog outputs, 106 dB signal-to-noise ratio for the analog inputs, and up to 192 kHz sampling rate for both inputs and outputs. This means you are able to capture and edit analog audio (e.g., converting LPs to CDs or MP3, converting VHS to DVDs or any other digital format, etc.) with this motherboard without adding any background noise.

The portrayed motherboard comes with independent analog audio outputs with gold-plated jacks and an optical SPDIF output. You can add a coaxial SPDIF output or route digital audio to your video card to
have digital audio in the HDMI connector using the available “SPDIF_OUT” header.

This motherboard has one Gigabit Ethernet port, controlled by an Intel WG82583V chip, which is touted to present higher performance than the Realtek RTL8111 chip commonly used on competing products.

In Figure 6, you can see the motherboard rear panel, with PS/2 keyboard and mouse shared connector, four USB 3.0 ports (blue), eight USB 2.0 ports, optical SPDIF connector, one eSATA-600 port, one Gigabit Ethernet port, and independent analog 7.1 audio outputs. The white USB 2.0 port may be used by the ROG Connect feature, which we will talk about in the next page.

Figure 6: Motherboard rear panel