TheOverclocker Issue 22 | Page 31

All results were obtained at 4600MHz s on an un-optimized Windows7 64-bit. These are our results, yours may vary so only use these as a guideline for a similarly configured system. Cinebench 11.5 Super Pi 8M 3DMark11 Heaven Xtreme Preset Hard Reset DX9 Just Cause 2 DX10 Wprime 1024 ASUS Crosshair V Formula-Z Overclocked 8.64 3m45.249 10334 2059.06 92.2 157.5 209.945 ASUS Crosshair V Formula-Z 6.95 4m36.885 9809 2041.885 80 142.54 260.832 It’s not anything obscure, but it essentially has the memory trace lengths on the board of equal size. So latency is improved and thus performance as well. In our testing we didn’t see it make much of a difference in read or write performance, but we must say that the AIDA 64 latency results proved favourable by a couple of nanoseconds. We are sceptical in accrediting this advantage to the technology as ASUS boards regularly offer better latency than many competing boards. Be that as it may, you’ll not suffer any performance penalty because of this design and if anything will gain in efficiency. Other than these few features and a comprehensive BIOS (easily the best around) the only limitation you will come across when using this board will be due to the CPU, memory or just user error but certainly not any short coming of the board. For the gamers, well you should already be aware of what this board offers where your gaming is concerned. INTEL Gigabit LAN, Supreme FX III (Expected more but certainly better than most on-board audio solutions) and the best looking AM3+ motherboard around. We won’t kid you and tell you that you’ll somehow improve your gaming prowess with this board over another one, but the truth is that for the ultimate AMD gaming machine, this has to be the board of choice. It costs almost exactly the same as the FX 8350, which is to say affordable, but with that you get plenty of features and a seemingly unparalleled board when it comes to performance, overclocking features and just about anything anyone would ever expect out of a motherboard. We here have no complaints about the Crosshair V Formula-Z and would definitely recommend it for those interested in the platform. There just isn’t a better high end board to pair with the FX 8350 than this one. [ Th