ASUS M4A89TD PRO 890FX SATA3 USB3 Crossfire Motherboard Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
1,283 words · ~6 min read
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today I'm going to be doing a quick outdoor unboxing of the ASUS M4 a89 TD
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Pro now I already did unboxings of the GTD Pro as well as the GTD Pro USB 3 so
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this is without the G which actually makes it better contrary to what you
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might think so this is using AMD's 890 FX chipset that means you've got full
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support for AMD's Phenom 2x6 processors as well as any other Phenom or Athlon on
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the am3 platform that you could possibly want to put in it it has turbo unlocker
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which means that you can adjust your performance on demand basically it means
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that you can unlock the turbo feature on the AMD 6 cores and you also have core
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unlocker which means you can unlock cores that are not there on the triple
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cores and the Dual cores so let me see
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what else we got oh yeah because it has an 890 FX chipset you've got native
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support for SATA 6 GB per second that means all of the ports are SATA 6 gig
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per second you also have power eat of support which is really cool if you have
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an external drive like the Seagate uh glex that I uh that I unboxed recently
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that actually has a power D sat option so that's pretty cool as well we've got
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an IO Shield we have wow not many
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accessories for an 890 FX board we've got an IDE cable then we have the Q
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connector for USB as well as the front panel connectors power switch reset
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switch all that good stuff then we have four SATA 3 connectors or SATA 6 gbit
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per second connectors there's no actual difference but they have a little label
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on them that says SATA 6 gbit per second I don't know if you're going to be a able to read that and they look cooler
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cuz they're black and white versus the old red ones that ASUS provides for SATA
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2 here is the support DVD do not use it
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throw it away download the latest off the ASUS website and then we've also got
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the turbo unlocker description so performance boost feature and it
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dynamically adjusts hcpu core fore okay so yeah basically like turbo mode okay
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good manual manual is in English and it
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is long let's have a look at the board itself
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ASUS has done such a good job with with the with the Aesthetics of their most
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recent boards I really really like what they've done they've gone from like kind
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of a I mean it wasn't that long ago ASUS was producing motherboards the color of
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cardboard and now almost everything's got a nice black PCB it's got a nice
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black and blue color scheme without you know any sort of random like you know
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one orange port or anything like that we used to see that a lot where there's
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just like everything is sort of one color except you know this dim slot is
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yellow because yellow plastic was cheaper that day or whatever it's really
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nice really sharp up here we've got our eight pin power connector so this is you
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know I get a lot of questions about this the fact that one side is covered means
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that if you only have a 4 pin power connector on your power supply you plug
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it into these ones if you have an 8 Pin power connector you take off this cover
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and plug it into the whole thing so you can see there's eight pins under there
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so that is why that covers on there just so that you don't accident try and plug
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a four pin into this side okay then we have our am3 CPU socket that's where you
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get support for all of the chips that I outlined before you have support for
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dual Channel DDR3 memory and it uses ausa's Innovative only one side
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Installation System so these are not actual Clips you just kind of slip the
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module in there clip it down and then clamp it on the other side here are the
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switches for Turbo key2 as well as their core unlocker so this core unlocker
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switch I think I did a video on it yeah I did do a video on with the G Series
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board is as simple as you hit the switch and it unlocks the cores it's really
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cool memo means that you can post with pretty much any memory as long as it
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fits in the slot so M will run any module at a very very safe setting so
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that you can get into the BIOS and adjust it to what it's supposed to run at here is the Southbridge here is your
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IDE port and here are your SATA 6 gbit per second ports all lined up down here
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now these aren't the ideal locations for your SATA ports I'd prefer to see them
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at a right angle like the IDE port here but what they have done is they've
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really kept it out of the way of your graphics card so even if you have a dual slot graphics card installed here and a
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dual slot one installed here it's only going to come up to about here so as
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long as you don't have like a PCI raid card or something this long then you're
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not going to run into any trouble plugging in as many devices as you want
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here's your BIOS chip here's your front USB 2.0 this board does not yes it does
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feature USB 3.0 and as ter in terms of
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expansion slots you've got dual PCIe 16x
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support you've got one PCIe 4X slot that will still be exposed even if you're
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running Crossfire and then you have two PCI slots one of which will be usable if
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you are running Crossfire with dual slots here's your North Bridge it's
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actually connected by a heat pipe to the mosfet cooler so I don't know if you can
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see that in there and this uses what someone suggested to me is more like a
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tree than anything else it uses their tree style of heat sink that I really
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like it's just kind of cool looking let's look at that from a couple
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different angles cameraman always appreciates this kind of stuff where it's like you know more about Aesthetics
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than actual performance and I'm starting to get that way myself to be perfectly
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honest let me see if there's anything else that I should really tell you about
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on this board while the cameraman oh yeah hybrid technology I
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think I remember what that is I think it's something to do with power savings
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actually okay well let's have a look at the back of the board we've got two PS2
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ports a clear seos button thank you ASUS that is the best best possible place for
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a clear seos button two USB 3.0 ports
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you can tell because they're color coded blue and they also have more pins inside
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we have one optical audio out six USB
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2.0 ports fire wire a powered EA Port
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gigabit Ethernet as well as 7.1 Channel audio thank you for checking out my
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unboxing of the M4 a89 TD Pro 890 FX
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motherboard from aus