so I can't believe how many requests I've received to unbox the assus
Republic of Gamers Crosshair 4 formula
motherboard and here it is so this motherboard is featuring AMD's latest
890 FX chipset and that means full
support for Phenom 2x4 X3 and not
pictured here but also their brand new fenom 2 X6 processors it has support for
Ati Crossfire X technology of course and
let's have a look at this board so it
uses a very new sort of styling for Aus
they where they've got kind of a it's hard to describe it but kind of an
angular structure to their heat pipes we'll have a closer look at those when
we get the board actually unboxed but it
uses the black and red and white color scheme that we're used to with Republic
of gamer boards so let's have a look up here at the top first of all we've got
the Rog connect plug and overclock tweak it the hardcore way so this port right
here is for plugging in the Rog connect peripheral which you can use to
overclock your system game first the speed you need to
pone that is awesome and uh we will
figure out what exactly that means but it appears to be the uh the onboard
buttons here one of which is an overclock button one of which is a core
unlocker button then you've got onboard start and reset buttons next we have
memo and any memory is okay oh cameraman
wants to go look at those fine there they are okay and then we have memo K
which is a pretty neat feature you can take any high performance memory and you
use this button to make sure that it'll post successfully in the board before
you go in and adjust all of the timings to their extreme timings then we have
Supreme FX xfi built-in so you've got built-in support for all of Creative xfi
Technologies that's pretty nice to have for an onboard audio solution let's go
around to the back of the box and see if there's anything that we didn't already
see and there is not so let's get it opened up and have a look at the
accessories that are included with the Crosshair 4
formula all right now if I could get this blocks out
then I would be able to talk to you about the accessories that are included with the
Crosshair 4 formula there we go so the top one contains the board and then the
bottom one contains the accessories comes open we got nice black
box here and everything very nice so
where should we start why don't we start with the io Shield it has a Seuss's uh
trademark Black Republic of Gamers IO shield with their puffy silvery stuff on
the inside next we have the Rog connect
cable which is just a USB cable next we
have a crossfire Bridge it's kind of funny to see that included with a
motherboard rather than with a video card normally it comes with the video
card but hey having an extra one never hurts you got a few zip ties to do some
cable management there you've got their Q connectors so if your case is kind of
old and doesn't come with a proper brick USB connector then this is a great way
to plug it in also for your front panel switches you can plug them into this
little connector and then you can take the whole thing and plug it right into the motherboard uh next we've got the
manual or the user guide I guess I could call it which has a whole bunch of stuff
in it why don't we get to that in just a second let's go through the rest of the cables so we have an esada USB 2.0
bracket for the back and then six SATA
cables uh three of which are right angle and three of which are straight so each
package contains one right angle and one straight SATA cable and then you've got
your Republic of Gamers sticker that you could put on your case or your cat or
whatever you want to it's big put it on your car if you really wanted to I guess
that'd be pretty sweet cruising down in your like sweet ride with a republic of
Gamers sticker on the side of your car yeah
wish I had some shades while I talk about that be all like cool anyway so we
have the drivers and utilities DVD don't use this download the latest off the
ASUS website then we have the users guide which includes a bunch of stickers
and information so these stickers are for labeling your SATA cables pretty
cool they have a little diagram here for how to do it hard drive 1 boot dis you
wrap it around your cable label it at both sides you will never be lost for
which cable goes where ever again very neat feature and then we have a little
uh pamphlet talking about turbo unlocker
on demand realtime system tuning
so optimize CPU core loading turbo unlocker is the next evolution of an
exclusive ASUS performance boost feature one click in the turbo V Evo interface
automatically and dynamically adjust each to speed up performance okay so
basically what they're doing is they're speeding up particular cores based on
how much load is on that core that's what they're trying to do so if you have
one core that's being used heavily by a game for example and another one that's
being used just a little bit in the background then it'll adjust the
frequency of the cores based on that sounds like a neat feature so here we go
let's get the board opened up here H user's guide there and here it is that
is one shiny looking motherboard like
not literally shiny but shiny like like cool like cool shiny all right so the
first thing we will find in the middle is wow this it's actually heavier than
most motherboards to be perfectly honest with you I think it's these huge heat
sinks that it has on it like the board has some real heft to it so these are
like you know what I'm going to talk about the heat sinks first since I'm oh no there's a back plate oh look we've
got voltage Regulators on the back it's only when they're using tons of phases
that you typically see that kind of stuff on the back of the motherboard
okay so moving around to the front we've got kind of these angular looking Moss
fet North Bridge Southbridge coolers I think they're very very cool and uh here
cameraman maybe you can adjust the camera to get kind of a good look at them I it's hard to really describe what
this style is like I was calling their old style the like Fortress of Solitude
style and I don't really know what to call this but it looks very futuristic
and Sleek I really like it you've actually got a heat pipe connecting this
heat sink to the North Bridge heat sink down to the Southbridge heat sink so we
got one flat heat pipe running there so it make sure that everything's stays nice and cool honestly there's nothing
here that's going to get particularly hot anyway so that's why ASUS is able to
take a little bit more Liberty with their design choices and make it sort of
look cool up at the top of the board we'll find our 8 Pin CP uh CPU power
connector right where it belongs I've actually had quite a few people ask me
about this little uh this little four pin cover here the four pin cover is so
that if you're using a power supply that only has a four pin connector you can
plug it in just these four and the board will still f function so if you have an
8 Pin power connector on your power supply you should remove this tab plug
in all eight pins uh in the middle of the board we
will find an am3 socket right where it belongs you've got support for all of
AMD's DDR3 CPUs so like I said before
x3s x2s x4s x6s X whatever you want next
we have support for dual Channel DDR3 and isus is also using their somewhat
unique uh RAM slots so the one side doesn't actually move back you just uncp
one side Slide the module into the one side put it down the rest of the way and
then clip it in so you only have to use one next we've got our 24 pin connector
along the side here right where it belongs and then right next to that
we've got probit so these are voltage readout points ground uh looks like
North Bridge Southbridge hyper transport
Northbridge vdd nb1 hm okay not sure RAM
CPU PLL CPU and then another ground point so that's that's a pretty cool
feature you can check all your voltages with a multimeter rather than relying on
unreliable BIOS level monitoring okay so
moving down we have oh this is kind of something that we should talk about we
have six SATA 6 gigabit per second ports
right there so those are all running off of the AMD chipset rather than using a
thirdparty chipset so that's one of the unique things about the brand new 800
series boards and then moving down we've got
the Republic of Gamers branding on our South Bridge heat sink there and let's
keep going down to the bottom so here's our front panel connectors and we've got
wow how many uh one two you know what I
actually can't tell what all of these are supposed to be it looks like any
number of okay yeah USB here USB USB and
I don't know what this one is so there you go all right here's all of our
buttons so we've got start and reset buttons on board here's the coreon
locker button and here is the overclock
button camera Man's phone is
ringing there we go okay you know what why don't we do something that I very
rarely do on this show and I'm actually going to consult the manual about
something yep right here on camera I'm going to attempt to find out what
something that I don't know what it does
does oh wow we're coming up on 10 minutes never mind I am not going to do
that unless I can find it really quickly forget it okay so let's move around to
the PCI Express slots we have 1 2 3 4 PCI e6x slots two PCI or PCIe PCI slots
and it actually says what these run at so this one runs at 4X this one runs at
either 16x or 8X this one runs at either
8X or H 1X and this one runs at 16x
regardless so let's go around to the back we can have a look at what
connectivity we have here we've got one PS2 keyboard Port we have 6 USB 2.0
ports we have a SOS clear button 2 USB
3. ports then we have optical audio out
firewire eSATA the Republic of Gamers
link and onboard 7.1 audio those look goldplated too that's pretty nice for
onboard audio thank you for checking out my unboxing of the Crosshair 4 formula
motherboard