ASUS Crosshair IV Extreme: Running SLI With the Lucid Hydra Chip

INTRODUCTION

Nvidia's SLI technology gives hardcore gamers the power they need by pairing up multiple graphics cards. To run SLI, not only must the cards be of the same family, the motherboard must also support the SLI technology. When SLI was launched, only boards with Nvidia's own nForce chipset SLI. The story changed when Intel refused to grant a license allowing Nvidia to make chipsets for Intel CPUs with integrated memory controllers. Despite this, Intel has worked out a deal with Nvidia where latest Intel chipsets (X58, P55, and P67) all support SLI natively (in addition to their CrossFire support).

AMD users are not as lucky, because AMD's 2006 buyout of ATI essentially halted any further support for SLI on AMD systems. We are not sure whether AMD is actively preventing Nvidia from developing chipsets for their processors, but there is no doubt that AMD wants to sell their brand of graphic cards and promote CrossFire. So it just makes more sense for them to have Nvidia competing for their business.

The last motherboard for AMD platforms that supports SLI is based on the Nvidia 980a chipset. There are few motherboards on the market with the 980a chipset that support the AM3 socket, and they are already becoming outdated due to the lack of SATA 6Gbps and USB 3.0 support. The ASUS Crosshair IV Extreme is the only one that combines these new features and CrossFireX and SLI support via the third party chipset.

We previously reviewed at the ASUS Crosshair IV Extreme based on the AMD 890FX chipset with native support for CrossFire. ASUS added the Lucid Hydra 200 chip for SLI support. We are revisiting the board and testing its SLI performance.