ASUS Crosshair IV Formula 890FX Chipset Motherboard Review

Overclocking the ASUS Crosshair IV Formula Motherboard

Overclocking greatly varies due to what hardware is being used and who is doing the overclocking. Always remember that no two pieces of hardware will perform the same, so our results will differ from what you might be able to get.

With stock BIOS settings, the AMD Phenom II X6 1055T processor runs with a 200MHz bus speed (base clock) and an x14.0 multiplier that is used to reach the final core clock of 2.8GHz when all the cores are at full load.

Firing up the ASUS Crosshair IV Formula with the Turbo Key enabled gave us a rock solid overclock of 3.258GHz. That is a 458MHz boost with the simple press of a button! Of course we can’t leave it at that!

With the only adjustments in the BIOS being the FSB we were able to achieve a rock solid overclock beyond the 4GHz mark. The ASUS Crosshair IV Formula did a great job scaling the voltage while it was left on auto. I am sure with some better cooling the ASUS Crosshair IV Formula would be able to push the AMD Phenom II X6 1055T even further!

Firing up wPrime we can see that each setting was stable with a full load across all six cores. wPrime also allows us to see the performance gains from each overclock. Using the Turbo Key overclock we knocked ~37.5 seconds or ~13% off of the overall time. Cranking up the overclock to 4.017GHz we can knock off~86 seconds or ~29% off of the overall time.