so today we'll be unboxing gigabytes cream of the cream for 890 FX
motherboard so this is their highest end AMD motherboard for the moment that
means that it has support for AMD's Phenom 2 X6 X4 or really anything else
that fits in an am3 socket should you so desire it as I said before it uses the
890 FX chipset so that means you've got support for Crossfire X up to fourway so
actually why don't we go through all of Gigabyte's uh interesting Technologies
they've got outlined on the front this is a new thing onoff charge that means
that there are certain USB ports on the board that will actually support
charging attached USB devices in this case they've got an iPhone attached to
it even when the computer is off and one of the reasons they're able to do that
is due to their 333 tech technology which is USB power 3x so they've really
updated the way that they deliver power to the USB ports they deliver three
times the specified power capability I mean you're not going to be over juicing
all of your components but it can provide up to three times the amount of
power even while the system's off very cool you've also got support for USB 3
as well as SATA 3 as part of their 333 thing you also have a three-year
warranty they should call it like 3333 in Canada and Ultra durable 3 it should
be like five threes how how many more three things can we do uh okay I don't
see much else they've got auto unlock so that means that you can do core
unlocking on this motherboard which I have covered a couple of times in the
past how to do that four-way Crossfire uh SATA 3 6 gig oh right it has
Southbridge 850 so that means you've got six SATA 3 ports so that is supported
natively by AMD's chipset uh Gigabyte actually did not have to add a
thirdparty chipset to this particular motherboard like they have to on the
Intel boards so over here we've got some more outlines of the mostly the same
features but here's a different one Sil hybrid silent Pipe 2 so this is a little
like Tower heat well I shouldn't say little it's a huge Tower heat sink thing
that you strap to the north bridge in order to get better cooling uh in my
experience with the old x58 extreme it
wasn't necessary but it did provide better cooling to the North Bridge as
well as the mosfets because it's all connected by heat pipes uh on the back I
don't see oh okay onboard quick switch so you've got onboard switches you've
got an onboard debug LED uh dual landan
ports and that pretty much covers everything that I see on the back here
okay cool so let's get this opened up there we
go just opening up the
box I love gigabytes high-end boxes they
just like they're a little bit busy you know but they cover everything so well
it makes my life easier I don't think I ever said what the boards called it's
the 890 fxa ud7 so ud7 puts it right up
in the top tier of Gigabyte motherboards all right let's get this
open so I'm going to take the board away from your interested Eyes First here and
then we'll have a look at the accessories that are included first so
okay I haven't seen Gigabyte do an accessory box like this before this is
kind of unique so you pull it apart like this and then you can see what is inside
so we have a users oh we have a sticker
there's a powered by Gigabyte sticker okay then we have a users manual as well
as a driver and utilities DVD so you
should download the latest off the site don't use this DVD and then in here this
is uh fully in English so it's covers
everything from BIOS configuration to probably even installing drivers and uh
some basic troubleshooting all that good stuff where to plug in all of your front
headers I think I missed one here here is the multilingual installation guide
book so this covers the physical installation and is in a variety of
different languages and inside there I also found a Dolby Home Theater sticker
very nice okay in the other side of this
uh pack here I have more stuff so first I have a
crossfire Bridge cross space fire okay
that's very interesting and the top is unlabeled and then I have another
Crossfire Bridge right okay I guess you could potentially need um a couple of
bridges if you're going to be configuring quad Crossfire okay next we
have some SATA cables oh These are nice
actually gigabytes moving away well partially from their yellow SATA cables
to something that actually matches the motherboard go figure beautiful I love
it two straight and two right angle and then we've also got an IDE cable
included next we have their eSATA bracket I really like these things it's
a very convenient way to just add more ESAT cables or add more eSATA ports to
your computer and then there's also a little power thing as well as an external power adapter so this is one
Molex to two SATA power so with this bracket and this cable you can plug in
two external hard drives very cool and they also include uh two e dat cables
for you as well this is a far more complete kit than they used to include
next we've got an IO Shield which handily labels all of the interesting
stuff on the back so uh that's okay we'll cover that more later okay let's
get this motherboard opened up
here okay got a little plastic thing on
top then we have the hybrid pipe too let
me see if I can get this up yeah you can probably see it pretty good anyway so
here's what you do you shake it so there's thermal compound included as
well as four screws and so see these four holes right here those are going to
strap onto the North Bridge right about where that water block is located right
now so Gigabyte gives you the option and it comes with the water block installed
by default of either and this is why it's called hybrid using this big tower
heat pipe cooler thing which actually mounts to a PCI bracket at the back okay
so then it mounts onto here and then goes all the way to the back of the uh
the motherboard like this looks like that okay or you can leave the default
water cooling Solution on which is an all copper Affair so you don't have to
worry about it gunking up your uh your uh your water loop uh if you have to you
know hook on any other blocks up to it and then I don't know where I was going
with that it has included water cooling okay 38 inch barbs so it'll be
compatible with most high-end water cooling systems as long as you're not using Overkill halfin barbs here's a
little USB 3 sticker okay let's have a look at the layout of the board
in the center we find in its ideal location the am3 socket surrounded by an
am3 bracket this board uses 8 plus two phase power as I recall uh but I can
double check that before I wrap up the video if I remember in the top left
corner we've got our eight pin power in its ideal location we've got CPU fan uh
this board does not use four pin fan connectors all over so that's a feature
that's pretty cool but not included on this one we've got two dual Channel sets
of DDR3 memory support so that's going to support up to 16 gigs of RAM with
current 4 gig dims then we have onboard power and reset switches this is a
breath of fresh air that is the right place for an onboard switch because when
you've got four graphics cards installed which you know if you have a lot of
money you would most of the onboard switches are down here you got a
graphics card here how you going to access it no this is perfect because
here you're plugging in the 24 pin connector there won't be anything else
around there very nice then we've got an IDE cable floppy cable connector then
down moving a little bit further we've got a clear Simo switch covered by a
little protective plastic cover this is also a much better location for this
than I've seen many times in the past while it's not quite as good as the back
panel it's way better than having like you know some stupid little jumper
hidden like here which I've seen many many many times okay next we've got our
SATA ports so this is SATA 2 right here
we've got two SATA 2 ports so you can use those for your Optical drives or
anything where you don't care how fast they go and then you've got six SATA 3 6
gbit per second ports very nice here's our onboard debug LED and uh yeah
someone was knocking on the door but I think they figured out that I'm shooting a video right now here's our front panel
connectors as well as our front USB uh one two 3 we've got three front
headers for USB then we have one front header for fire wire and one for comb
okay all right PCI Express configuration this is where it starts to get
interesting you see all these little chips in here those are going to be
splitting apart the PCI Express Lanes provided with this chipset so if you
want to run two 16x cards at 16x speed
you're going to be using this top port and then this one down here so if you're
running dual Crossfire you're going to cover up these two and these two so that
will leave you a PCI Express 8X port a
PCI Express 4X Port as well as a PCI
Express 8X Port okay so just just to be
clear if you're running four you're going to cover this one again here so
you'll be running in 16x 8X 16x and 8x
and it's quite possible that it's going to split at 8888 but I'm not actually
100% sure either way as long as you're running adex or above you are not going
to run into any performance disadvantages so let's just have a quick
look at the cooling Solution on the sth bridge I mean that's a pretty weak
cooler but it looks really neat and since that sth bridge doesn't kick off a
whole lot of it totally doesn't matter I like it then we've got our North Bridge
cooling solution here which I've talked about enough I think and then our mosfet
cooler so that cools the 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
plus two phase power design on this motherboard now let's have a quick look
at our IO Shield at the back so USB 2.0 ports we've got 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 now
these are those USB 2.0 SL esatap Port
so we've actually got two e SATA ports on the back and then they include that
bracket you can have up to four SATA ports on this board very cool we have a
PS2 mouse keyboard combo Port digital audio out in both Optical and coaxial
flavors fire wire another fire wire 2 GB
Ethernet USB 3.0 as well as 7.1 audio
now I wish they' labeled which USB ports can be used for charging but I guess
I'll go ahead and assume that at least some of them can and uh too bad for me
thank you for checking out my unboxing of the 890 fxa ud7 from Gigabyte