AMD boards are one of the many other chipset configurations that happens to have multiple series and versions that are of an improvement former versions, while the Crosshair in mostly considered themselves as an NVIDIA type of board chipset configuration, but the absence NVIDIA of making any new boards to support SLI in AMD and also in Intel, but having to integrated to the X58 chipset to compensate with the competition. So ASUS has not really have a choice to go to the dragon series form AMD and use the newer revision 790FX and the full support of the new AM3 socket.
To the obvious conclusion, the Crosshair II formula is a high gaming end of the market, costing about $204US in the net, and the prize gap for this is kind of the expensive side so, this board is only for the gaming enthusiast who is not afraid of pushing this board to the performance peak and high quality gear. ASUS having the 790FX chipset combination having crossfire support for any multiple ATI radeon graphic cards, and also the support of the newer faster DDR3 memory with a standard speed of 1333MHz. Other features in the Crosshair III is the inclusion of an external sound card from creative to boost the sound quality, in the theory side of the equation, because of its out limitation from an onboard card, this can be an addition for being a much faster PCI bus and also, having only two graphics slot can pretty limit you to a dual SLI configuration or a quad if you are lucky and rich.
The physical form of the board, the basics, the ATX form factor, the twelve by 2 phase power regulators in the CPU and the memory, the dual DIMM memory slots, placements of cooler power pins and the main power jack are all in the best spots for case configuration, as well as, SATA and other I/O ports. Most of the time , the crosshair III formula is a top form from ASUS, but limiting from the PCI slots, still gives in a full x16 on each card.
In the performance rank for this 790FX board, in the new black edition series quad Processor, and a standard 512MB HD4870, with the memory test successful in all of the stages in the latency and also some of the bandwidth synthesis completely pan most of the older AMD and Intel core 2s, gaming is also exceptional in most games going at the high 50fps, while Crysis lagged in some occasions, a crossfire configuration fixed that problem and most other high end games.
Overall, the board that ASUS has made is quite top of the line in most cases, dependable over clocking though I haven’t shown it yet, but it works well over 3.8GHz in air cooling with some minor tweaks in the power rating. Though this is a premium motherboard, it is still practical in normal day to day uses and in gaming stresses.