Introduction

It's not very often that a motherboard we see actually makes us raise an eyebrow or two.  Looking at a wall full of them at trade shows across the world, 99% of the time you'd be hard pressed to find one that really stood out from the crowd in both appearance and functionality.  Since AMD made the move to an on-chip memory controller with the Athlon 64 processor, the AMD motherboard market has been fairly stagnant as motherboard and chipset designers struggled to find a way to make their products better than the competition, without the crutch of memory controller performance to lean on. 

In June of this year at the annual Computex show in Taiwan, Asus showed off a "demonstration board" that had some unique features on it; LCD post display, audio riser card and liquid cooled chipsets were the main attractions.  Some of these features (and some other interesting ideas) made it on to the Asus Crosshair motherboard which we are reviewing here today. The board is based on the NVIDIA nForce 590 SLI chipset and the AMD AM2 processor platform. 

Specifications (from Asus.com)