so today I'll be having a look at a motherboard from ASUS this is the m4a 79
xtd Evo so this is part of their Extreme
Design philosophy of motherboard building so let's have a quick look at
what all of that means Extreme Design means that they're going for number one
performance number one reliability and number one safety so safety refers to
things like uh low Emi so that's electromagnetic interference emissions
okay it's got instant performance up with the turbo key so that's how they're
achieving their number one performance goal and the number one reliability is
achieved using extreme durable solid capacitors as well as stat cool 3 so
stat cool 3 puts a whole lot of copper in the PCB which enables heat to be
dissipated more evenly not just by the heat sinks attached but also by the PCB
of the motherboard itself now this is a 790 X chipset board which means we've
got support for Crossfire up to quad Crossfire X we have support for fenom
2x3 and fenom 2x4 also with a BIOS update you have full support for AMD's
latest Phenom 2x6 processors it features
Express gate which is an instanton feature that enables you to access games
productivity and internet no no no no that's something else unrelated it
allows you to access Skype and internet browser some basic stuff without
actually booting up into Windows 7 which it is completely ready for as you can
see from the sticker there okay moving around to the back of the box we've got
a whole big old list of stuff that it
does so DDR 31800 with overclocking 8
plus2 phase power we've got a whole lot of other stuff here 8 channel audio
stylish heat SN they actually call that out right on the box which I agree with
by the way turbo key anti- surge protection that's kind of neat okay so
moving around here what do we got we got the new gen A+ two phase power and I
wish I could get the lighting just right here so you could read that oh that's
not so that there we go okay so 6 plus2 phase power breakthrough power design to
fully unleash CPU potential okay then we have epu which is system level Energy
Efficiency so that's an actual chip on the motherboard that takes care of
making sure that your system is staying as efficient as possible and then turbo
V easy real time overclocking tuning
tunings well whatever they were close
Okay so let's open up this box and have a look at what we find inside first
thing I find is the Q connector so you can use that to inst stall all of your
front panel case connectors on and then you can plug the whole brick right into
your motherboard very convenient then we have a users manual and okay so user
guide which contains a drivers and utilities DVD don't use that download
the latest off Theus website I'm starting to sound like a broken record saying that maybe I'll stop no I won't
okay so in here this is all English contains information about ASUS's
software qan as well as their other stuff how to create a raid volume uh how
to install all of your Hardware on the motherboard very nice thank youus then
we have an IO Shield it's not color coded just this plain silver one but it
does have their their mushy uh back plate cover then we have four say to two
cables so these are two right angle and two straight cables which I will allow
you to see by holding them up here there we go then we have one IDE cable all
right it's black matches all right let's get the
motherboard out of the box and the first thing I notice about it is definitely
the stylish heat sinks that is for sure
now this is a little bit different than the heat sinks that I've seen on any of
the isus motherboards that I have previously unboxed and it's not quite
their Fortress of Solitude style nor is it their uh their their new sort of more
uh more angular style that you see on the Republic of Gamers boards but this
is more like a wavy design so I don't know how well you can see that there you
go and so the uh the North bridge is quite similar and it's actually like a
two-tone color scheme so you can see there's like a black base and then kind
of a wavy blue part that comes out very unique looking um like to see a black
PCB that always sort of makes a build look more sharp very nice all right so
let's start with the basic features you got an am3 socket with support for dual
Channel DDR3 that's fairly standard that's what you expect up at the top
you've got a four pin CPU power connector right where it belongs top
left over on the right you've got a 24 pin power connector again right where it
belongs then let's move around to you know what I'm just going to like stand
here in front of the camera it's a little bit easier on uh on my
positioning okay so there's nothing else uh really all that interesting up on the
top this does not feature the memo K button but I mean really DDR3
compatibility is so good these days with all the platforms that I've played with
you don't have to worry too much about it we've got one IDE port here as well
as uh wow a multitude of SATA ports
so okay these four are going to be running off of the chipset and then
these three are going to be running off of somewhere else unless there are six
running off of the chipset you know what I'm not going to guess we're going to
have 1 2 3 4 5 6 seven SATA two ports
down here in the bottom left you can see that these two are on a right angle so
this is sort of the ideal configuration in my mind but I can see why ASUS didn't
worry about making all these one's right angle because your PCI Express slots are
positioned quite high up on the board so even if you have a dual slot card
installed here it's not going to interfere with the SATA port so it's not
that big of a deal next here we've got our USB 2.0 front panel connectors and
then we have a FireWire front panel connector now this is an odd one I don't
remember a time that I've seen a uh the
a front header so start reset uh hard drive LED power LED I don't remember a
time that I've seen it here here on an ASUS board very odd normally ASUS puts
it right here and it's sort of always there here we've got the chassis
intrusion detection as well as an overvolt CPU jumper then we have our
front panel audio and its ideal location then okay PCI Express expansion slots we
have two PCIe 16 supporting Crossfire X
if you install two dual Slot Cards you're going to end up with one PCIe 1X
and one PCI slot that is definitely the ideal um configuration for those slots
moving up here we have a com header okay it's pretty nice then we move around to
the back of the board where we find the I/O for the back panel two PS2 ports I
personally still like to see these on a board they don't take up that much space
although some people complain about it then we have 1 2 3 4 5 6 78 USB 2.0
ports no support for USB 3.0 but this is a fairly budget oriented board it's like
a budget gaming platform so it looks good performs good but you're missing
some of the Frills and gimmicks then we have optical audio out sat which is
really nice to see fire wire gigabit Ethernet as well as 7.1 audio thank you
for checking out my unboxing and first look at the m4a 79 xtd Evo