ASUS M4A89GTD PRO/USB3 AM3 890GX DDR3 SATA3 6.0Gb/s Crossfire Motherboard Unboxing & First Look
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2010-05-08
·
1,975 words · ~9 min read
0:00
so today I'm going to be unboxing the latest from AMD the M4 a89 GTD Pro usb3
0:08
this is an ASUS motherboard featuring AMD's latest 890 GX chipset and the
0:13
biggest difference between the AMD 890 GX chipset and anything that's come
0:17
before it is that it has native SATA 3
0:21
or SATA 6 gabit per second Support also
0:25
I have this cool AMD football isn't this awesome bring your A game so I'm going
0:30
to throw it to the cameraman and hopefully he can catch it that was really lame that's okay it's done
0:35
now okay so here we go this features Extreme Design number one performance
0:40
reliability and safety it is hybrid which we'll figure out later okay it
0:46
supports am3 ooh coreon Locker this is a big one so AMD has actually made it a
0:51
little bit more difficult for the motherboard manufacturers to allow you
0:54
to unlock dual and triple course but ASUS seems to have found a way around it
0:59
so they're enabling their users to do that you have support for GPU boost
1:02
Crossfire x side port and hybrid Crossfire X so that means that you can
1:07
use the integrated graphics and you can put like some kind of uh low-end
1:12
graphics card and you can run them in crossfire or something it seems very
1:16
convoluted and I can't imagine really any reason you would want to do that if
1:20
you want to use an add-in graphics card you put one in if you don't then you don't core unlocker intelligently
1:25
unlocks true core performance yep GPU boost so you can actually overclock the
1:30
integrated GPU that's pretty cool hybrid Pro processor turbo V Evo so okay you
1:37
can overclock with auto tuning okay turbo key2 this is basically like the
1:41
old turbo button on uh really really
1:45
really old Intel processors so they're saying that you can basically use a key
1:49
to boost your CPU performance up with one button press 100% solid capacitors
1:53
it has memo K which I'll explain a little bit later SATA 6 gbit per second
1:57
and eup okay well why don't we open this
2:00
up and see if we can find more details on exactly what this thing is so the
2:05
first thing we find inside ooh I like these already we find
2:10
SATA connectors I just like them look at
2:14
these they're black and white that's cool and they have like a two-tone color
2:18
scheme so it actually comes with oh it only oh it only comes with a couple like
2:23
that I'm guessing these are the SATA 6 gbit per second connectors although any
2:26
decent SATA cable will run fine with SATA 6 gbit per second so they include
2:31
two straight connectors one black and white one black and then two right angle
2:35
connectors one black and white and one black it's going to make it a little difficult to have a unified color scheme
2:39
in your build but what are you going to do okay next we have an IDE cable not
2:45
exciting next we have oh this these are good these are the Q connectors so you
2:49
use these if you have a case that doesn't have them in bricks and has them
2:52
all split apart to make things a little bit easier for yourself uh then you've
2:56
got one of these little ASUS VGA switch cards so I believe this is to turn
2:59
Crossfire fire on and or off uh please
3:02
keep the switch card on the black PCI e6x slot only remove it when you want to
3:06
install other devices okay I wouldn't mind seeing something
3:10
like that already installed on the motherboard that's okay though all right
3:14
then we've got the io Shield which has their spongy foamy uh metally stuff on
3:18
the back then we have the user guide
3:21
which also includes a driver CD don't use this download the latest drivers off
3:25
the assus website oh ooh case badge
3:28
shiny metal case badge power by
3:31
ASUS okay then they oh there's info about the VGA switch card that's pretty
3:35
useful thank you for that information tutorial uh document so it's for
3:41
installing One graphics card you put it in there okay well that seems pretty
3:45
self-explanatory I'm glad they included a little addendum for
3:48
that all right let's have a look o that's a nice looking board actually you
3:53
don't see too many like schmexy looking
3:56
AMD boards these days but uh it looks like they've really gone all out on this
4:00
one here I'm going to I I'll do that camera man go away
4:04
here put that in there okay so let's put
4:07
the board on top of the box here and have a look so yeah that looks really
4:11
nice so they've done a couple things completely differently that I have never
4:14
seen before first of all we've got these really cool looking uh vrm heat sinks we
4:19
should have a look at those from the side because they look pretty sweet and
4:23
I I'm just kind of going out on a limb here but I'm guessing because it's
4:27
labeled hybrid technology it's all about the power savings so I'm thinking maybe
4:31
it's supposed to look kind of like a tree like
4:34
green but then it's blue so I I don't
4:38
know if that's for cameraman's giving me a funny look I don't think he agrees with me but but the North Bridge one
4:43
looks kind of like waves it's kind of like water which is also very
4:47
environmentally friendly so that's my guess I could be totally wrong and feel
4:52
free to leave your comments about whether you think I'm right or the cameraman should be giving me a funny
4:56
look about that green stuff so let's have a look at the layout of this board
5:00
it is an am3 board supporting up to 140 W TDP TDP CPUs so that means you can put
5:06
any am3 capable chip in here you've got
5:09
support for dual Channel DDR3 memory as with all am3 boards that support DDR3
5:15
it's dual Channel all right we've got a few buttons up here that should be
5:19
pretty relevant so we've got the turbo key 2 as well as the core un Locker
5:22
buttons and then we have the memo K button I said I'd explain that later
5:26
memo K basically means that even if you're using RAM that requires
5:30
more than stock voltage to run M will
5:33
automatically set all of the RAM at like a safe setting that means that you'll be
5:38
able to post even if you aren't running it at optimal settings also to do with
5:41
the RAM slots we've got these cool ASUS exclusive RAM slots that only have a
5:46
clip on one side the other side is not actually a clip so the intention is that
5:50
you just put Slide the RAM slot in that way and then put it down on this side
5:54
and clip it in so that in theory it's a little bit easier to install all right
5:58
we've got the 20 24 pin connector in its ideal location along the right hand edge
6:02
of the board and this is probably the weirdest thing I've seen on a
6:05
motherboard in quite a while the 8 pin connector is huge look at this thing
6:11
okay so the eight pin connector ah rather than sticking about this high off
6:15
the board like we normally see I'm going to turn this around actually sticks like
6:20
3 4 cm up from the board I'm guessing
6:24
that makes it a little bit easier to access in theory um one thing that it
6:30
would also do is make it a little bit more difficult for the um for any
6:33
cabling if you're bringing it up from the back of the board and then up around to the front it' have to be a little
6:37
longer but most power supplies might like most quality power supplies these
6:41
days have pretty long8 pin connectors anyway so I guess it's not two things it
6:47
was cold outside and the batteries of the camera died so here we are back in
6:50
the office and as I was discussing before the eight pin is really long that
6:55
is really all I had to say about that beyond what I have already said so we
6:59
we' got also PCI Express connectors so we've got two PCIe 16x connectors one
7:04
PCIe 1X and one PCIe 4X this could be useful if you have say for example a
7:09
raid card or any other device that needs a little bit more bandwidth than a PCI
7:14
e1x then down here we've got two PCI I think this is a very ideal layout
7:18
because if you're using two dual slot graphics cards I don't know how easy
7:22
this is going to be basically you'll have one PCI e4x and one PCI still
7:27
available now USB connectors this board has tons check this out you've got four
7:32
USB headers Each of which is good for up to two ports or like one card readers so
7:37
you can connect a lot of USB devices to this particular motherboard down here
7:42
this is a big selling point here these are SATA 6 GB per second ports these are
7:47
native ports that means they're running right off of the AMD 890 GX chipset Okay
7:53
so we've got 1 2 3 4 here and I don't really like the placement of these two
7:57
because they could potentially be covered by a full length dual width
8:01
graphics card here but you still got these two available and then we have two
8:04
more on the edge of the board which would also be accessible no matter what
8:08
one IDE port as if I mean you know what actually I
8:13
shouldn't say that a lot of people are still using these for DVD dri so it's a
8:16
perfectly legitimate thing to continue to include on a motherboard no floppy
8:20
connector though and that I can't say I'll miss so there we go let's have a
8:24
look at the back here we have lots of different connectors let's start at the
8:28
top we've got a PS2 keyboard Port then we have 1 2 3 4 USB 2.0 ports and then
8:36
we have hold on let me see if I can figure out what oh cool this is one of
8:39
those combo ports so we actually have 1 2 3 4 five USB 2.0 ports then we have an
8:45
optical audio out HDMI out DVI out VGA
8:49
out so lots of different video output display adapter options then we have
8:56
fire wire and ESAT so this is one of those combo USB slat ports very cool
9:02
then we have a gigabit Lan and 7.1 audio thank you for checking out my unboxing
9:07
of the ASUS M4 a89 GTD Pro USB 3 wait no
9:14
stop wait stop hold on there's more I forgot I just said the name of the board
9:19
it has USB 3 right in it these blue ports they're USB
9:23
3 I didn't even say that also don't forget to comment on the video let me
9:28
know if you agree with me or the cameraman about the the green heat sink
9:32
design that is all