At the beginning of the year the AMD high-end motherboard market was in a desperate need for some TLC, Asus being one of the very first companies to deliver back then and it isn't shy of doing this yet again, with the addition of the Crosshair IV Extreme that packs a Lucid Hydra chip enabling mix-vendor multi-GPU setups.

Three, from the five PCIe x16 slots available, are powered by this chip that allows users to mix and match graphics cards built by Nvidia and AMD in order to use them together for a performance increase similar to that obtained by building a SLI of CrossFire X setup.

This also means the Crosshair IV Extreme brings SLI support to the table, a feat really uncommon among AM3 motherboards, thanks to the Hydra chip.

Together with Lucid's solution, this motherboard uses AMD's 890FX and SB850 chipsets that support the latest AMD AM3 processors, including the six-core Thuban CPUs.

Since this belongs to the Republic of Gamers (ROG) series of products, Asus has also added a bunch of proprietary features like ROG Connect which enables hardware-level tweaking through USB from a remote notebook PC, RC Bluetooth used to access a host of board, memory and CPU overclocking parameters from any Bluetooth-enabled device, while ROG iDirect introduces PC tuning from iPhone.

Of course that SATA 6.0 is available, users having nine such ports to choose from, alongside USB 3.0 support, Asus being one of the main supporters of this standard.

Excellent overclocking abilities should also be on the feature list, the Crosshair IV Formula making itself known for its powerful memory tuning capabilities, so I expect the Crosshair IV Extreme to behave in much the same way if not even better.

All this features will set you back €290, according to TCMagazine, the board being now available for pre-order around Europe, so this isn't a cheap solution by any means although its performance should be top-notch.