Yes, many requests for this one. Many, many requests. This is the Crosshair 4
Extreme and it contains all of the latest technologies. In fact, some that
have been around for a while but just took well a lot of months to actually be
implemented on anything. This has the Hydrolologics engine by Lucid. So what
that means is that you have support for
not only ATI Crossfire X but also
multi-GPU support for mix and match here
up here. So cross links 3 technology mix and match vendors and cards and whatever
else you could possibly want to mix and match for graphics cards. So experience
true graphics freedom. You can run two Radeon cards. You can run two GeForce
cards. You can run a GeForce and a Radeon. You can run mismatched GeForce
cards or match GeForce cards. It doesn't matter. It's not an SLI ready
motherboard. Please note the absence of an SLI logo. This is an AMD board with
an AMD 890 FX chipset, but you can still
run two GeForce cards thanks to the Hydrolologics chipset right there from
Lucid. Okay, it's a Republic of Gamers board, so you've got ROG connect, so you
can plug in another computer and you can make any changes to the system settings
that you could want to. It has USB BIOS flashback. That would be really nice,
actually. That's a cool feature. So, you just throw a USB with the BIOS on it,
you plug it into the back, and you boot up and it restores it. Very cool. You've
got uh Oh, yeah. I believe that one is so that you can use Bluetooth to
overclock through your phone or something like that. So, that's a pretty neat feature if you're into that. And 3D
Mark Vantage Advanced Edition is included. Let's have a look at the back
of the box and see what they have to say. It's all of the exact same stuff.
Wow. Okay. Five PCIe 16X slots. Now,
we're going to have to have a look at the manual for a change. I know. I don't
think I've ever actually shown you the manual for a motherboard during an
unboxing, but we're going to have to do that to find out exactly how the
Hydrolologics engine splits up those PCI
Express lanes because it actually acts as um as an intermediary between the
chipset and the graphics cards and that's how it performs its magic where
it takes two mismatched cards and and takes the performance of them and adds
them together and makes more performance. So, let's have a look at the accessories. First, we have
What on earth is this? We'll be back in a moment. This is a Bluetooth riser
card. I got it figured out. We have a USB cable for ROG Connect. We've got an
IO shield, which is black and looks cool. We have some temperature probes.
Very nice. We have some cable ties. We
have a Q connectors. We have a Crossfire bridge.
We have voltage readout little plugs and you plug those into the
board and then you plug your multimeter into there and you can read the voltages of a bunch of various aspects of the
board. We have a FireWire USB IO PCI
back plate. We have one, two, three bags
of two. So that's a total of six SATA 3 cables. And then we have two SATA 2
cables. Please note those cables are identical other than the color.
We have a Crosshair for four extreme motherboard DVD which you should throw
away and download the latest from the ASUS website. And we have labels for
your SATA cables as well as the manual. So give me a moment. I'm going to look
this up and I'll be as you can see this is a very complicated chart. And hold
on, cameraman, don't move the camera. Uh look at this paragraph so that if people
want to, they can freeze the video and read it. Don't move. Don't move. Don't
zoom. Steady hands. Steady hands, cameraman. There you go. Okay. So,
basically what happens is if you want to run Crossfire, just native Crossfire,
you use PCIe slots one and three. Okay.
If you run want to run Lucid Hydra,
okay, so that's uh ATI, NVIDIA, or X, which is mixed multiGPU mode, then you
can use any one of these combinations here. Crossfire X will also work with
these com with these combinations. But if you want to run it natively, it's
here. Depending where you want to install your theoretical RAID card or
other PCIe peripheral, you can get varying um
uh widths for the PCIe lanes. So you can get up to 16x, 16x, 16x for triple VGA
mode. And then if you want to run quad VGA, you'll have to settle for 16, 16,
8, and 8. So there you have it. Let's keep going with this unboxing
and we'll have a look at the board itself. U that is really like
yeah I don't know it throws a lot of uh it looks like it probably threw a lot of
complications into the engineering process. I mean when you're figuring out
how to how to optimize you know which
ones are running off the bridge chip and which ones are running natively off the
chipset and like all this stuff. It's um
a miracle they managed to make a board like this at all actually
and a high-end one no less. Look at that. Okay, so that is a very very nice
looking board. So why don't we start with the general layout. The first thing
we're going to find on this board is a CPU socket. That's an AM3 socket
compatible with the latest quad core and six core CPUs from AMD. Up here in the
top left, you will find an 8pin CPU power connector as well as a very
elaborate looking PWM and chipset cooling solution. So you can see there's
a heat pipe. Actually, I'm going to get you to get a slightly different angle on this. First of all, there's fins down
here. And then there's thicker fins up here. Okay? So, you can see the heat
pipe is running all the way through here, down this way, under here, over
here, and then down to the south bridge. And that is actually where the
hydrolologics chip resides if I recall
correctly. Let me have a look. I believe it is. Oh, it could also be here.
Hm. This could be trouble. Well, not sure exactly where it is. My guess would
be here though. Okay. And you can actually see there is a cooling fan
inside here as well and it is plugged in right there. So that is probably one of
the most complicated cooling solutions I've seen on an ASUS board in a very
long time. Uh because it is an AM3 socket board. You've got support for for
dual channel DDR3 memory up to 16 gigs. You've got onboard hey look at that core
unlocker button. That makes it easy, doesn't it? Then you've got start,
reset, as well as switches for all the PCI
Express slots. You know what? This can be a lifesaver if you have water cooling. If you're using full cover
blocks, it's almost impossible to remove one card and not another one. So, if
you're trying to um to troubleshoot like a dead card or anything like that, this
can like seriously it's worth its weight in gold. You've got probit, which is
where you can find out the voltages from a bunch of different aspects of the
board. So, you've got a ground here. We've got CPU, PLL, CPU, RAM,
Northbridge. Uh, yeah, a bunch of other stuff, too.
That's great. Uh, you got a go button. I believe that's actually the memo K
button. Okay. And then we've got our 24 pin power along the right hand edge of
the board, exactly where it belongs. Then we have SATA, and they're
specifically labeling these as optical drive. I guess that's because they're SATA 2, cuz the other six ports are
actually SATA 3 6 GB per second ports.
All right, let's keep going down. You can see we've got dual BIOS chips here
as well as a SIMOS clear button. Then we
have our front panel connectors, a couple
H couple of USB headers presumably. Okay,
so 9 10 7 8.
Okay. And then I'm not sure what the others are. Okay, that's fine. All four
pin fan connectors on this particular board and there are quite a few of them.
And then we've got a couple of auxiliary Molex connectors. So there's one here,
one up here over by that chipset. So that means if you're loading this up with five GPUs. I mean remember this
this plug here was not designed to provide that much power through the
slots on the motherboard. So ASUS has gone ahead and augmented it with a
couple of additional Molex plugs. Now if you're only running one or two cards,
it's probably fine not to plug these in. But if you are loading it up with five
high power cards, definitely plug those in to your power supply. Let's go around
and have a look at the back of the board on the IO panel. So, we have a PS2 port,
which I personally still like to see just because sometimes USB keyboards can
be a little bit finicky when you're running an unstable overclock. We've got
1 2 3 4 5 six USB 2.0 ports, a SIMOS
clear, optical audio out that looks like a powered ESATA port as well as a
regular ESATA port. We have two USB 3.0
ports, gigabit Ethernet, ROG connect,
and 7.1 analog audio out. Thank you. Oh,
no, no, not thank you. Thank you. I mean, thank you. But also, check this
out. So, we got our one, two, three. These are our normal ATX mounting holes.
But wait, there's more. This is not an EATX board, but because an EATX board
would probably be about here, and it would have one more screw hole, but it is actually wider than an ATX board. So
bear that in mind. If your case is not a little bit wider, it's not going to fit
this motherboard. Thank you for checking out this unboxing and first look. And
don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more cool stuff like this. The
Lucid chip is here. Cameraman and I work together. This is the south bridge. This
is the Lucid Hydraologics chip. And this is the north bridge. Thank you for
watching.