so I have a bu request unboxing for you today this is the assus Republic of
Gamers branded board so you know it's going to be feature Rich and have good
accessories and this is the Crosshair 3 formula this is a motherboard it is
designed for gamers and it has support for the AMD fenom 2x4 X3 it is 790 FX
and it has Crossfire X support so the first thing you will notice about the
Crosshair 3 is that it has a window nah
the motherboard doesn't have a window the box has a window window so you can actually check out the board on the
store shelf before you buy they've done a quick overview of the features that
set this board apart so let's go through that really quickly here you've got memo
K which is a solution that allows you to press a button on the board and in
theory it should be able to post with pretty much any memory which will allow
you to get into the BIOS configure the optimal settings and then get the
computer running you've got CPU level up which is a simple click for instant
upgrade basically a software overclocking utility Supreme FX with xfi
software that's pretty cool so they've updated their Supreme effects uh little
daughterboard sound card to xfi then you've got a bundled copy of 3D mar6 and
kasperski Antivirus and then oh yeah we've also got start and
reset buttons on board I always like to see that on any highend or even a lowend
board it's a great feature on the back it reiterates pretty much the same thing
and yeah that's it okay so let's get this thing open and dive right into what
is arguably the highest end am3 board
out there right now so accessory package first as per my usual Arrangement you've
got a nice black box here containing all of your accessories so first of all
you've got an IDE cable all right then
you've got five sat cables this is kind of an odd number of SATA cables okay
five and then you've got a USB and fire
wire PCI back plate then you have the
LCD poster now I the LCD post has been
around for a while in their Republic of Gamers line and I've never seen it do
anything more useful than inform you with a CPU init error that your board
isn't working but if I didn't already know it wasn't working I wouldn't have
plugged in the LCD poster okay there's your 7.1 audio as well as your two
different kinds of digital audio out with the Supreme FX listen with absolute
HD xfi supports up to eax 4.0 this is a
PCI Express 1.0 card okay sorry PCI
Express 1X card next we have some zip ties for cable
management then we have their Q connector technology I mean most cases
come with block connectors these days anyway so it's not a huge deal but it's
nice to have then you've got an IO Shield okay and then the Crosshair 3
formula users guide as well as a drivers
DVD don't use this download the latest drivers off the manufacturer website as
per my usual advice all right next let's
get to the board itself so so it comes in its nicely little
windowed casing here let's get the top
plastic cover off and figure out how to get it out of here I think I need to
move these aside and then I can lift the board out this way here we go okay so
first thing let's do the general layout so you've got your power connectors in
their usual desirable places with the 24 pin along the right hand Edge and the
eight pin up at the top left corner of the board you can see the plug right
here for your LCD poster so so be aware of that and then you've got your power
design or your whatever 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
9 10 phase power design right here as well as your mosfet Cooling and your
North Bridge and South Bridge cooling then you've got your am3 socket so this
supports am3 DDR3 chips only at well at
this time only DDR3 chips because all of
the dim slots on the motherboard are DDR3 dual Channel DDR3 compatible down
at the bottom you've got three PCI Express 1X ports one PCI port and then
two PCI Express 16x ports these operate at full 60 next and they are compatible
with Crossfire but not with SLI in terms
of your oh yeah yeah yeah here let's have a look at these onboard power
buttons so there's your start there's your reset here's your memo okay button
and then clear seos is still done with a jumper on this board so you don't
actually have a button for that internally but more on that later and
then here we've got four SATA ports that our right angle and then we have one
additional non- angled SATA port now let's have a quick look at the back IO
panel of the board so you've got six USB ports that's very few on a
board of this sort of uh a price point but I'm guessing there's some kind of
reason for it you've got one PS2 keyboard port and then you've got a
clear seos button bag here honestly this is my favorite place in the world for a
clear seos button it can come in handy and be a total Lifesaver then you've got
EA fire wire and 1 GB Ethernet port so
thank you for checking out my unboxing of the ASUS Republic of Gamers Crosshair
3 formula