so today I'm going to be unboxing the latest from AMD the M4 a89 GTD Pro usb3
this is an ASUS motherboard featuring AMD's latest 890 GX chipset and the
biggest difference between the AMD 890 GX chipset and anything that's come
before it is that it has native SATA 3
or SATA 6 gabit per second Support also
I have this cool AMD football isn't this awesome bring your A game so I'm going
to throw it to the cameraman and hopefully he can catch it that was really lame that's okay it's done
now okay so here we go this features Extreme Design number one performance
reliability and safety it is hybrid which we'll figure out later okay it
supports am3 ooh coreon Locker this is a big one so AMD has actually made it a
little bit more difficult for the motherboard manufacturers to allow you
to unlock dual and triple course but ASUS seems to have found a way around it
so they're enabling their users to do that you have support for GPU boost
Crossfire x side port and hybrid Crossfire X so that means that you can
use the integrated graphics and you can put like some kind of uh low-end
graphics card and you can run them in crossfire or something it seems very
convoluted and I can't imagine really any reason you would want to do that if
you want to use an add-in graphics card you put one in if you don't then you don't core unlocker intelligently
unlocks true core performance yep GPU boost so you can actually overclock the
integrated GPU that's pretty cool hybrid Pro processor turbo V Evo so okay you
can overclock with auto tuning okay turbo key2 this is basically like the
old turbo button on uh really really
really old Intel processors so they're saying that you can basically use a key
to boost your CPU performance up with one button press 100% solid capacitors
it has memo K which I'll explain a little bit later SATA 6 gbit per second
and eup okay well why don't we open this
up and see if we can find more details on exactly what this thing is so the
first thing we find inside ooh I like these already we find
SATA connectors I just like them look at
these they're black and white that's cool and they have like a two-tone color
scheme so it actually comes with oh it only oh it only comes with a couple like
that I'm guessing these are the SATA 6 gbit per second connectors although any
decent SATA cable will run fine with SATA 6 gbit per second so they include
two straight connectors one black and white one black and then two right angle
connectors one black and white and one black it's going to make it a little difficult to have a unified color scheme
in your build but what are you going to do okay next we have an IDE cable not
exciting next we have oh this these are good these are the Q connectors so you
use these if you have a case that doesn't have them in bricks and has them
all split apart to make things a little bit easier for yourself uh then you've
got one of these little ASUS VGA switch cards so I believe this is to turn
Crossfire fire on and or off uh please
keep the switch card on the black PCI e6x slot only remove it when you want to
install other devices okay I wouldn't mind seeing something
like that already installed on the motherboard that's okay though all right
then we've got the io Shield which has their spongy foamy uh metally stuff on
the back then we have the user guide
which also includes a driver CD don't use this download the latest drivers off
the assus website oh ooh case badge
shiny metal case badge power by
ASUS okay then they oh there's info about the VGA switch card that's pretty
useful thank you for that information tutorial uh document so it's for
installing One graphics card you put it in there okay well that seems pretty
self-explanatory I'm glad they included a little addendum for
that all right let's have a look o that's a nice looking board actually you
don't see too many like schmexy looking
AMD boards these days but uh it looks like they've really gone all out on this
one here I'm going to I I'll do that camera man go away
here put that in there okay so let's put
the board on top of the box here and have a look so yeah that looks really
nice so they've done a couple things completely differently that I have never
seen before first of all we've got these really cool looking uh vrm heat sinks we
should have a look at those from the side because they look pretty sweet and
I I'm just kind of going out on a limb here but I'm guessing because it's
labeled hybrid technology it's all about the power savings so I'm thinking maybe
it's supposed to look kind of like a tree like
green but then it's blue so I I don't
know if that's for cameraman's giving me a funny look I don't think he agrees with me but but the North Bridge one
looks kind of like waves it's kind of like water which is also very
environmentally friendly so that's my guess I could be totally wrong and feel
free to leave your comments about whether you think I'm right or the cameraman should be giving me a funny
look about that green stuff so let's have a look at the layout of this board
it is an am3 board supporting up to 140 W TDP TDP CPUs so that means you can put
any am3 capable chip in here you've got
support for dual Channel DDR3 memory as with all am3 boards that support DDR3
it's dual Channel all right we've got a few buttons up here that should be
pretty relevant so we've got the turbo key 2 as well as the core un Locker
buttons and then we have the memo K button I said I'd explain that later
memo K basically means that even if you're using RAM that requires
more than stock voltage to run M will
automatically set all of the RAM at like a safe setting that means that you'll be
able to post even if you aren't running it at optimal settings also to do with
the RAM slots we've got these cool ASUS exclusive RAM slots that only have a
clip on one side the other side is not actually a clip so the intention is that
you just put Slide the RAM slot in that way and then put it down on this side
and clip it in so that in theory it's a little bit easier to install all right
we've got the 20 24 pin connector in its ideal location along the right hand edge
of the board and this is probably the weirdest thing I've seen on a
motherboard in quite a while the 8 pin connector is huge look at this thing
okay so the eight pin connector ah rather than sticking about this high off
the board like we normally see I'm going to turn this around actually sticks like
3 4 cm up from the board I'm guessing
that makes it a little bit easier to access in theory um one thing that it
would also do is make it a little bit more difficult for the um for any
cabling if you're bringing it up from the back of the board and then up around to the front it' have to be a little
longer but most power supplies might like most quality power supplies these
days have pretty long8 pin connectors anyway so I guess it's not two things it
was cold outside and the batteries of the camera died so here we are back in
the office and as I was discussing before the eight pin is really long that
is really all I had to say about that beyond what I have already said so we
we' got also PCI Express connectors so we've got two PCIe 16x connectors one
PCIe 1X and one PCIe 4X this could be useful if you have say for example a
raid card or any other device that needs a little bit more bandwidth than a PCI
e1x then down here we've got two PCI I think this is a very ideal layout
because if you're using two dual slot graphics cards I don't know how easy
this is going to be basically you'll have one PCI e4x and one PCI still
available now USB connectors this board has tons check this out you've got four
USB headers Each of which is good for up to two ports or like one card readers so
you can connect a lot of USB devices to this particular motherboard down here
this is a big selling point here these are SATA 6 GB per second ports these are
native ports that means they're running right off of the AMD 890 GX chipset Okay
so we've got 1 2 3 4 here and I don't really like the placement of these two
because they could potentially be covered by a full length dual width
graphics card here but you still got these two available and then we have two
more on the edge of the board which would also be accessible no matter what
one IDE port as if I mean you know what actually I
shouldn't say that a lot of people are still using these for DVD dri so it's a
perfectly legitimate thing to continue to include on a motherboard no floppy
connector though and that I can't say I'll miss so there we go let's have a
look at the back here we have lots of different connectors let's start at the
top we've got a PS2 keyboard Port then we have 1 2 3 4 USB 2.0 ports and then
we have hold on let me see if I can figure out what oh cool this is one of
those combo ports so we actually have 1 2 3 4 five USB 2.0 ports then we have an
optical audio out HDMI out DVI out VGA
out so lots of different video output display adapter options then we have
fire wire and ESAT so this is one of those combo USB slat ports very cool
then we have a gigabit Lan and 7.1 audio thank you for checking out my unboxing
of the ASUS M4 a89 GTD Pro USB 3 wait no
stop wait stop hold on there's more I forgot I just said the name of the board
it has USB 3 right in it these blue ports they're USB
3 I didn't even say that also don't forget to comment on the video let me
know if you agree with me or the cameraman about the the green heat sink
design that is all