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so I can't believe how many requests I've received to unbox the assus

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Republic of Gamers Crosshair 4 formula

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motherboard and here it is so this motherboard is featuring AMD's latest

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890 FX chipset and that means full

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support for Phenom 2x4 X3 and not

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pictured here but also their brand new fenom 2 X6 processors it has support for

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Ati Crossfire X technology of course and

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let's have a look at this board so it

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uses a very new sort of styling for Aus

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they where they've got kind of a it's hard to describe it but kind of an

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angular structure to their heat pipes we'll have a closer look at those when

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we get the board actually unboxed but it

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uses the black and red and white color scheme that we're used to with Republic

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of gamer boards so let's have a look up here at the top first of all we've got

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the Rog connect plug and overclock tweak it the hardcore way so this port right

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here is for plugging in the Rog connect peripheral which you can use to

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overclock your system game first the speed you need to

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pone that is awesome and uh we will

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figure out what exactly that means but it appears to be the uh the onboard

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buttons here one of which is an overclock button one of which is a core

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unlocker button then you've got onboard start and reset buttons next we have

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memo and any memory is okay oh cameraman

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wants to go look at those fine there they are okay and then we have memo K

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which is a pretty neat feature you can take any high performance memory and you

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use this button to make sure that it'll post successfully in the board before

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you go in and adjust all of the timings to their extreme timings then we have

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Supreme FX xfi built-in so you've got built-in support for all of Creative xfi

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Technologies that's pretty nice to have for an onboard audio solution let's go

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around to the back of the box and see if there's anything that we didn't already

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see and there is not so let's get it opened up and have a look at the

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accessories that are included with the Crosshair 4

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formula all right now if I could get this blocks out

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then I would be able to talk to you about the accessories that are included with the

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Crosshair 4 formula there we go so the top one contains the board and then the

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bottom one contains the accessories comes open we got nice black

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box here and everything very nice so

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where should we start why don't we start with the io Shield it has a Seuss's uh

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trademark Black Republic of Gamers IO shield with their puffy silvery stuff on

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the inside next we have the Rog connect

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cable which is just a USB cable next we

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have a crossfire Bridge it's kind of funny to see that included with a

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motherboard rather than with a video card normally it comes with the video

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card but hey having an extra one never hurts you got a few zip ties to do some

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cable management there you've got their Q connectors so if your case is kind of

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old and doesn't come with a proper brick USB connector then this is a great way

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to plug it in also for your front panel switches you can plug them into this

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little connector and then you can take the whole thing and plug it right into the motherboard uh next we've got the

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manual or the user guide I guess I could call it which has a whole bunch of stuff

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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

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bracket for the back and then six SATA

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cables uh three of which are right angle and three of which are straight so each

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package contains one right angle and one straight SATA cable and then you've got

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your Republic of Gamers sticker that you could put on your case or your cat or

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whatever you want to it's big put it on your car if you really wanted to I guess

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that'd be pretty sweet cruising down in your like sweet ride with a republic of

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Gamers sticker on the side of your car yeah

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wish I had some shades while I talk about that be all like cool anyway so we

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have the drivers and utilities DVD don't use this download the latest off the

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ASUS website then we have the users guide which includes a bunch of stickers

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and information so these stickers are for labeling your SATA cables pretty

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cool they have a little diagram here for how to do it hard drive 1 boot dis you

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wrap it around your cable label it at both sides you will never be lost for

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which cable goes where ever again very neat feature and then we have a little

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uh pamphlet talking about turbo unlocker

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on demand realtime system tuning

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so optimize CPU core loading turbo unlocker is the next evolution of an

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exclusive ASUS performance boost feature one click in the turbo V Evo interface

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automatically and dynamically adjust each to speed up performance okay so

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basically what they're doing is they're speeding up particular cores based on

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how much load is on that core that's what they're trying to do so if you have

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one core that's being used heavily by a game for example and another one that's

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being used just a little bit in the background then it'll adjust the

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frequency of the cores based on that sounds like a neat feature so here we go

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let's get the board opened up here H user's guide there and here it is that

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is one shiny looking motherboard like

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not literally shiny but shiny like like cool like cool shiny all right so the

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first thing we will find in the middle is wow this it's actually heavier than

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most motherboards to be perfectly honest with you I think it's these huge heat

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sinks that it has on it like the board has some real heft to it so these are

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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

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got voltage Regulators on the back it's only when they're using tons of phases

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that you typically see that kind of stuff on the back of the motherboard

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okay so moving around to the front we've got kind of these angular looking Moss

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fet North Bridge Southbridge coolers I think they're very very cool and uh here

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cameraman maybe you can adjust the camera to get kind of a good look at them I it's hard to really describe what

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this style is like I was calling their old style the like Fortress of Solitude

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style and I don't really know what to call this but it looks very futuristic

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and Sleek I really like it you've actually got a heat pipe connecting this

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heat sink to the North Bridge heat sink down to the Southbridge heat sink so we

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got one flat heat pipe running there so it make sure that everything's stays nice and cool honestly there's nothing

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here that's going to get particularly hot anyway so that's why ASUS is able to

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take a little bit more Liberty with their design choices and make it sort of

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look cool up at the top of the board we'll find our 8 Pin CP uh CPU power

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connector right where it belongs I've actually had quite a few people ask me

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about this little uh this little four pin cover here the four pin cover is so

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that if you're using a power supply that only has a four pin connector you can

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plug it in just these four and the board will still f function so if you have an

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8 Pin power connector on your power supply you should remove this tab plug

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in all eight pins uh in the middle of the board we

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will find an am3 socket right where it belongs you've got support for all of

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AMD's DDR3 CPUs so like I said before

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x3s x2s x4s x6s X whatever you want next

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we have support for dual Channel DDR3 and isus is also using their somewhat

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unique uh RAM slots so the one side doesn't actually move back you just uncp

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one side Slide the module into the one side put it down the rest of the way and

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then clip it in so you only have to use one next we've got our 24 pin connector

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along the side here right where it belongs and then right next to that

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we've got probit so these are voltage readout points ground uh looks like

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North Bridge Southbridge hyper transport

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Northbridge vdd nb1 hm okay not sure RAM

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CPU PLL CPU and then another ground point so that's that's a pretty cool

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feature you can check all your voltages with a multimeter rather than relying on

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unreliable BIOS level monitoring okay so

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moving down we have oh this is kind of something that we should talk about we

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have six SATA 6 gigabit per second ports

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right there so those are all running off of the AMD chipset rather than using a

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thirdparty chipset so that's one of the unique things about the brand new 800

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series boards and then moving down we've got

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the Republic of Gamers branding on our South Bridge heat sink there and let's

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keep going down to the bottom so here's our front panel connectors and we've got

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wow how many uh one two you know what I

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actually can't tell what all of these are supposed to be it looks like any

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number of okay yeah USB here USB USB and

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I don't know what this one is so there you go all right here's all of our

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buttons so we've got start and reset buttons on board here's the coreon

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locker button and here is the overclock

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button camera Man's phone is

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ringing there we go okay you know what why don't we do something that I very

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rarely do on this show and I'm actually going to consult the manual about

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something yep right here on camera I'm going to attempt to find out what

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something that I don't know what it does

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does oh wow we're coming up on 10 minutes never mind I am not going to do

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that unless I can find it really quickly forget it okay so let's move around to

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the PCI Express slots we have 1 2 3 4 PCI e6x slots two PCI or PCIe PCI slots

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and it actually says what these run at so this one runs at 4X this one runs at

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either 16x or 8X this one runs at either

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8X or H 1X and this one runs at 16x

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regardless so let's go around to the back we can have a look at what

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connectivity we have here we've got one PS2 keyboard Port we have 6 USB 2.0

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ports we have a SOS clear button 2 USB

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3. ports then we have optical audio out

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firewire eSATA the Republic of Gamers

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link and onboard 7.1 audio those look goldplated too that's pretty nice for

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onboard audio thank you for checking out my unboxing of the Crosshair 4 formula

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motherboard