Welcome to my unboxing of the Crosshair 4 Formula. This is a 990X motherboard.
It is an AMD motherboard, hence the Crosshair branding on the Republic of
Gamers. It is compatible with all the latest AM3 CPUs. That one's got thermal
compound all over it, so not going to show that off too much. but it is also
compatible with upcoming AM3 Plus CPUs.
So, that means we're going to be able to put uh so far undisclosed unreleased
CPUs into this motherboard with no
complications. Very, very cool. So, Socket M3 Plus supports 32 nm CPU up to
eight cores. Okay, well, they're going to go ahead and say it then. Um, it's
cool and quiet up to 140 watt CPU support. Here we go. 3 PCI E 2.06 Nex.
So add up to 16 dual 16x or 1688. So
that means you got full support for three-way uh graphics technologies using
uh PCIe 8x native bandwidth for all three which means you're not going to
see any performance degradation. Supports three-way NVIDIA SLI and
Crossfire X technology. Okay, we've got support for six Theta 3 6 GB per second
ports as well as an additional as media
controller with giving us an external SATA 6 Gbit per second. So the ESATA on
this board is actually SATA 3 6 GB per second. That's kind of cool. So if you
had like a super high-speed SSD as an external drive, you could get the most
out of it. Okay. Intel gigabit LAN. That's kind of interesting on an AMD
board, but uh yeah, I I support that decision. Intel LAN is very well
regarded. And we have an as media USB3 controller giving us four at the back
and two at the midboard. Okay, let's go
ahead and get this guy opened up. And I guess I spoiled my big surprise on the
back there, and that is that yes, this board has full support for NVIDIA SLI
technology on an AMD chipset. Wow. So,
it supports Crossfire X and SLI. It's
got ROG Connect, which means you can plug into an external computer and you
can uh control the settings of the board itself. It has Extreme Engine Digi Plus,
which is their combination of analog and digital design elements for the PWM.
It's got game first, which is the Intel Ethernet, which is in theory lower
latency and faster. Supreme FX X52.
Okay. And that pretty much does it. Oh, it includes Demon Tools. Interesting. I
like Demon Tools. Wouldn't mind a free copy of that with my
motherboard. Okay, let's open this baby up and see what we got for accessories.
So, we have six SATA 36 GB per second cables. That's uh they are all straight
to right angle. So, all right angle cables. Crossfire bridge, SLI bridge.
This still amuses me that there's SLI compatibility on this board. We have Q
connectors. So that is for the front panel headers as well as one of the
front USB 2 headers. We got some zip ties included. We got an IO shield with
their puffy shiny backing on it. We have
a Crosshair 5 formula series user guide as well as a drivers and utilities DVD.
Download the latest from the ASUS website. We also have their handy cable
labels. So, when you're bundling cables and routing them all somewhere, you
won't lose track of which is which when you're plugging them into your drive. We
got a quick start guide. We have one of those huge ROG stickers that you I guess
you put on the side of your case.
Um, yeah, I'm not not real sold on the ROG sticker. It's all good. We got a
3-way SLI bridge included. And finally, the ROG Connect cable, which is just a
straight USB A2A cable. Now, let's have
a look at the board itself. So, this is, as with all of ASUS's ROG, Republic of
Gamers boards, it is a very high-end
board. It looks high-end, it feels high-end, and it performs high-end. You
can take that to the bank. This thing actually looks great.
This is one of the better looking ROG boards that I have uh that I have ever
seen. So, why don't we start with the CPU socket area? So, here you can see we
have a black socket. and they're calling it AM3B. So, this is an AM3 Plus socket.
It is uh fully compatible with AM3 Plus CPUs as indicated by the black color. We
also have the standard AMD mounting
mechanism around it. Although, you can see it's missing those those pieces of
plastic that bridge it together. No big deal. It uses the same mounting holes,
the same mounting clips. This is going to be fully compatible with pretty much
any AMD CPU cooler going back several socket generations. We have a really
slick looking PWM cooler here with a heat pipe running down the middle of it.
So, it's got a kind of a matte black and anodized red finish to it. Looks really
good. So, you can actually see the chipset down there. So, this is cooling
both the chipset as well as the PWM.
Now, this I haven't seen yet. So, I have an 8 pin CPU power connector in its
ideal location on the top left edge of the board. And I also have a four pin.
So, it looks like ASUS is allowing you to deliver a tremendous amount of power
to the CPU socket, but they have not opted to go with dual 8 pins, which we
have seen on some high-end boards in the past. So, there's probably a reason for
it, but there you go. So, you've got one 8 pin and one four pin CPU power
connector. Okay, I'm going to do all the fan headers later cuz there seems to be
a ton of them. We've got a go button. We've got four dual channel DDR3 slots.
So, these are easy install slots, which means there's no clip on the one side.
You slide the module in like this. Push it down, clip it in, just like that. All
right. Here we've got our 24 pin connector in its ideal location along
the right hand edge. And there's the midboard USB 3 connector. So, this is a
great location for this. I very much prefer this to having it down here
because this is closer to the front of your case, which is where it should be.
All right. We have six SATA 3 6 Gbit per second ports that are running off of the
AMD controller which is under this heat sink. And then we have this one running
off of a custom chip. So that's a third party chip. I would use all of these
before I go and use this one. Here's our front panel connectors. So your uh power
switch, your LEDs, all that good stuff. We've got two USB 2.0 front panel
connectors. We've got an overse button.
We have a start and reset switch built in. Love these. These are very handy for
me. And then we have front panel audio. Here's the X5 Supreme FX. And moving up,
we've also got this, which is good. This is a four pin auxiliary power connector.
If you're actually going to load four graphics cards or even three into this
board, you should probably be using this. Okay. We have an ROG connect
switch over here. So, what that is for is for using the external computer to
change settings on your board. So, you'll just turn that on. You plug into
the ROG Connect port right there. This is not a normal USB port. And it's off
to the races. Now, this board has six expansion slots total. So, you can see
the top slot spot is empty. You've got four PCIe 16x slots. So, these are
capable of running it up to 16 8x8x for 3-way SLI or Crossfire. You have one
PCIe 1X slot, one PCI slot in addition
to those. And I did promise to tell you guys about all of the four pin fan
headers on this board. There's a ton of them. Okay. So, there's 1 2 3 4 up here
in the top right corner. Okay. Then there's one, two down here, three down
here along the bottom edge. So, that's six. Wait, seven so far. And finally,
one at the back here for your chassis fan. So, that's eight four pin PWM fan
controllers. Outstanding. All right, let's have a
look at the IO shield. At the back, we got four USB 3.0 ports. So, that is a
total of six. One PS2 keyboard mouse combo port, a clear SIMOS button. This
is the best place in the world for a clear SIMOS button. Big fan. Okay, we've
got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven USB 2.0 ports, e SATA, that's
running SATA 36 Gbit per second, I remind you, optical audio out, more USB
3, the ROG connect, the Intel gigabit
LAN, and then those look goldplated. We got goldplated 7.1 audio out. So, what
that means is these are going to be more robust, more durable connectors than you
would see if they were not goldplated. The mounting mechanism for the um
chipset and PWM heat sinks is outstanding. We've actually got back
plates on here that are using thermal interface material to uh in all
likelihood interface with thermal heat producing components on the back of the
board. We've also got a nice robust metal AMD back plate to go along with
the plastic clips on the front. So, those are going to be very, very solid.
Thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the Crosshair 5
formula. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings,
reviews, and other computer videos.