so today i'm going to be doing a quick unboxing and first look at the ASUS
m4a89 gtd pro motherboard the biggest
difference between this one and their other 890 gx motherboard is
that the other one has slash usb 3. so
the 890 gx chipset is AMD's latest chipset for their phenom 2 phantom 3
phenom athlon 2 all of their different cpus okay
and what it brings to the table more than anything else is support for sata36
gigabit per second now right now SATA 3 and usb 3 are really hot features
everyone wants to have them but this chipset doesn't have integrated support
for usb3 so that means it's up to the motherboard manufacturers to build that
in using a third-party chipset so that's why this one does not include usb 3 but
it does include SATA 6 gigabit per second support and you can see i think
they're actually using completely the same box for these boards even i don't i
don't think they've made like they've made a couple changes they've added a
bar for usb 3 here and then that's about it so anyway this is going to be fairly
similar to the one we already did for the pro slash usb 3 but why don't we
open this up and do a quick unboxing here anyway so we've got an i o shield
which includes their foamy padding at the back then we've got a user's guide which also
has a little addendum about the vga switch card so that's this guy right
here when you have one graphics card installed you should put the vga switch
card into the other PCIe 16x slot and
that will allow the board to function properly if you
have two graphics cards in crossfire mode then it's fine to remove this and
install another graphics card just make sure you don't lose it in case you ever
want to go back to single graphics in the future next we've got the driver dvd don't use
this install the latest off ASUS.com inside the user's guide you'll find the
usual stuff including a motherboard overview some basics on how to plug everything in
and i mean ASUS does a pretty good job of their motherboard manual so you
should find everything you need in there next we've got four SATA cables
including their cool i'm guessing these are SATA yeah these are labeled SATA six
gigabit per second cables there's one straight and one right angle and then
for the regular SATA two cables you've got one straight one right angle what i
suspect is that the SATA two cables would work just fine for sata3 anyway
but there you there you go these ones look cooler so
yeah next we've got an ide cable and then we
have their q connector so we have one usb and one for the front uh power hard
drive led reset switch all that good stuff
then let's get the board out itself it seems like most of our viewers were
overwhelmingly in favor of the cameraman's view on uh on this this
chipset heatsink so they do not think it looks like a tree or like a wave or like
a green initiative sort of thing so i stand corrected i suppose but let's have
a look at the overall layout of this board this is an am3 socket that means
you've got support for ddr3 in dual
channel configurations so up to 16 gigabytes i believe would be the spec
for this particular board you've got a fair amount of room around the socket
you can see that these mosfet and northbridge coolers don't actually go up
all that high so if you're using like a good size tower heatsink you don't have
to worry too much about there being any clearance issues there now let's keep
moving our way around you've got ASUS proprietary ddr3
dim slots so that means that the one end here is not actually a clip so you just
slide the RAM in that side put it down into the other side and then clip it
closed up here we've got our buttons for the turbo key2 as well as the core
unlocker now core on locker is a huge feature for ASUS 890 gx boards because
the other manufacturers at the time of filming this video do not have support
for core unlocking and that's what a lot of people are doing with the lower end
dual core and triple core AMD processors is they're actually able to turn off or
turn on the uh the locked course so am
ASUS has managed to get around AMD's restriction and they have enabled that
feature on their 890 gx boards turbo key2 is kind of like what it sounds like
makes the board go faster okay so memo k
is their technology to make sure that no matter what kind of RAM you're running
in here if you press this button it'll set it to safe settings which will allow
you to post the board and configure it the way that you want the 24 connector
as well as the eight pin connector are in their ideal locations at the right
hand edge and the top of the board this
is a really weird 8-pin connector i've never seen one like this before it's
very tall that is all
all right so then let's move around here is the chipset itself so that's where
our status six gigabit per second ports you can see they're labeled here
are running off of so we have one two three four five six SATA six gigabit per
second ports here is your front panel hookups then you've got an ide port
right here here we have a ton of usb 2.0
connectivity so you could hook up like a card reader uh four front usb ports and
even like uh like a fan controller like a
m-cube t-balancer or something and have them all hooked up all at the same time
without any third party cards then we've got our pci and pci express slot layout
i really like this layout you've got two PCIe 16x slots those are crossfire ready
then you've got a 1x slot as well as a pci slot that would be covered by dual
slot graphics so after you got your crossfire cards and you have access to
one pci express 4x slot and one pci slot
i think that's a good mix for a board like this then let's move around to the
back where we have the rest of our connectivity
okay so we've got a ps2 port that's for keyboard then we've got one two three
four usb 2.0 ports but then it gets a little
bit sketchier so why don't we do this first and then we'll move over there so
we have one optical audio out HDMI dvi
vga then we have a firewire port gigabit
lan and 7.1 audio now here's where it gets a little bit more confusing these
two blue ports on the usb 3 model are actually usb 3 ports they are not
labeled usb 3 ports and you can see that the usb 3 chipset is missing so those
are usb 2 ports they are not usb 3 even
though they are color coded blue this is also a usb port but it is a usb 2 slash
e-SATA port that means that both kinds of connectors will actually fit in here
and will operate with this particular slot you've got 7.1 audio as well as
gigabit lan and thank you for checking out my unboxing of the m489 gtd pro not
usb 3.