Asus Crosshair Motherboard Review

Now on to the motherboard itself. Something I noticed right away about this motherboard was the passive cooling used on the board. It utilizes heatpipes to carry the heat around and up to the large heat sinks. An attractive Republic of Gamers logo is painted on the top of the chipset block, letting you know that this is not your everyday motherboard.




Immediately to the right of the chipset are the 6 on-board SATA2 connectors. We can also see the on-board power/reset switches for using this motherboard outside of a case, an addition that was no doubt inspired by their use on the DFI series of motherboards.  We can see that there are indeed two 16x PCI-E SLI slots on this motherboard, making it fully SLI capable. There is an additional slot between the two 16x slots, which should give us adequate room for larger cards, or aftermarket cooling if you so choose. 


There are 4 slots which are designed to take DDR2 memory modules up to 800MHz (without overclocking). There is sufficient space around these slots as well if you have wider modules or are worried about clearances. 

Read on for the rest of the motherboard!