ASUS Crosshair IV Formula 890FX Gaming Motherboard Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2010-05-08
·
2,032 words · ~10 min read
0:00
so I can't believe how many requests I've received to unbox the assus
0:05
Republic of Gamers Crosshair 4 formula
0:09
motherboard and here it is so this motherboard is featuring AMD's latest
0:14
890 FX chipset and that means full
0:18
support for Phenom 2x4 X3 and not
0:21
pictured here but also their brand new fenom 2 X6 processors it has support for
0:26
Ati Crossfire X technology of course and
0:30
let's have a look at this board so it
0:34
uses a very new sort of styling for Aus
0:38
they where they've got kind of a it's hard to describe it but kind of an
0:42
angular structure to their heat pipes we'll have a closer look at those when
0:45
we get the board actually unboxed but it
0:48
uses the black and red and white color scheme that we're used to with Republic
0:53
of gamer boards so let's have a look up here at the top first of all we've got
0:57
the Rog connect plug and overclock tweak it the hardcore way so this port right
1:02
here is for plugging in the Rog connect peripheral which you can use to
1:06
overclock your system game first the speed you need to
1:11
pone that is awesome and uh we will
1:14
figure out what exactly that means but it appears to be the uh the onboard
1:20
buttons here one of which is an overclock button one of which is a core
1:23
unlocker button then you've got onboard start and reset buttons next we have
1:28
memo and any memory is okay oh cameraman
1:32
wants to go look at those fine there they are okay and then we have memo K
1:36
which is a pretty neat feature you can take any high performance memory and you
1:39
use this button to make sure that it'll post successfully in the board before
1:43
you go in and adjust all of the timings to their extreme timings then we have
1:47
Supreme FX xfi built-in so you've got built-in support for all of Creative xfi
1:53
Technologies that's pretty nice to have for an onboard audio solution let's go
1:57
around to the back of the box and see if there's anything that we didn't already
2:01
see and there is not so let's get it opened up and have a look at the
2:06
accessories that are included with the Crosshair 4
2:10
formula all right now if I could get this blocks out
2:14
then I would be able to talk to you about the accessories that are included with the
2:20
Crosshair 4 formula there we go so the top one contains the board and then the
2:25
bottom one contains the accessories comes open we got nice black
2:31
box here and everything very nice so
2:35
where should we start why don't we start with the io Shield it has a Seuss's uh
2:41
trademark Black Republic of Gamers IO shield with their puffy silvery stuff on
2:45
the inside next we have the Rog connect
2:49
cable which is just a USB cable next we
2:52
have a crossfire Bridge it's kind of funny to see that included with a
2:56
motherboard rather than with a video card normally it comes with the video
2:59
card but hey having an extra one never hurts you got a few zip ties to do some
3:03
cable management there you've got their Q connectors so if your case is kind of
3:07
old and doesn't come with a proper brick USB connector then this is a great way
3:12
to plug it in also for your front panel switches you can plug them into this
3:16
little connector and then you can take the whole thing and plug it right into the motherboard uh next we've got the
3:21
manual or the user guide I guess I could call it which has a whole bunch of stuff
3:26
in it why don't we get to that in just a second let's go through the rest of the cables so we have an esada USB 2.0
3:31
bracket for the back and then six SATA
3:35
cables uh three of which are right angle and three of which are straight so each
3:39
package contains one right angle and one straight SATA cable and then you've got
3:42
your Republic of Gamers sticker that you could put on your case or your cat or
3:47
whatever you want to it's big put it on your car if you really wanted to I guess
3:52
that'd be pretty sweet cruising down in your like sweet ride with a republic of
3:57
Gamers sticker on the side of your car yeah
4:00
wish I had some shades while I talk about that be all like cool anyway so we
4:05
have the drivers and utilities DVD don't use this download the latest off the
4:09
ASUS website then we have the users guide which includes a bunch of stickers
4:14
and information so these stickers are for labeling your SATA cables pretty
4:18
cool they have a little diagram here for how to do it hard drive 1 boot dis you
4:22
wrap it around your cable label it at both sides you will never be lost for
4:26
which cable goes where ever again very neat feature and then we have a little
4:31
uh pamphlet talking about turbo unlocker
4:34
on demand realtime system tuning
4:38
so optimize CPU core loading turbo unlocker is the next evolution of an
4:42
exclusive ASUS performance boost feature one click in the turbo V Evo interface
4:47
automatically and dynamically adjust each to speed up performance okay so
4:50
basically what they're doing is they're speeding up particular cores based on
4:56
how much load is on that core that's what they're trying to do so if you have
5:00
one core that's being used heavily by a game for example and another one that's
5:04
being used just a little bit in the background then it'll adjust the
5:08
frequency of the cores based on that sounds like a neat feature so here we go
5:13
let's get the board opened up here H user's guide there and here it is that
5:20
is one shiny looking motherboard like
5:24
not literally shiny but shiny like like cool like cool shiny all right so the
5:31
first thing we will find in the middle is wow this it's actually heavier than
5:35
most motherboards to be perfectly honest with you I think it's these huge heat
5:39
sinks that it has on it like the board has some real heft to it so these are
5:43
like you know what I'm going to talk about the heat sinks first since I'm oh no there's a back plate oh look we've
5:47
got voltage Regulators on the back it's only when they're using tons of phases
5:51
that you typically see that kind of stuff on the back of the motherboard
5:54
okay so moving around to the front we've got kind of these angular looking Moss
5:59
fet North Bridge Southbridge coolers I think they're very very cool and uh here
6:05
cameraman maybe you can adjust the camera to get kind of a good look at them I it's hard to really describe what
6:11
this style is like I was calling their old style the like Fortress of Solitude
6:15
style and I don't really know what to call this but it looks very futuristic
6:19
and Sleek I really like it you've actually got a heat pipe connecting this
6:22
heat sink to the North Bridge heat sink down to the Southbridge heat sink so we
6:27
got one flat heat pipe running there so it make sure that everything's stays nice and cool honestly there's nothing
6:31
here that's going to get particularly hot anyway so that's why ASUS is able to
6:36
take a little bit more Liberty with their design choices and make it sort of
6:39
look cool up at the top of the board we'll find our 8 Pin CP uh CPU power
6:44
connector right where it belongs I've actually had quite a few people ask me
6:47
about this little uh this little four pin cover here the four pin cover is so
6:52
that if you're using a power supply that only has a four pin connector you can
6:56
plug it in just these four and the board will still f function so if you have an
7:01
8 Pin power connector on your power supply you should remove this tab plug
7:04
in all eight pins uh in the middle of the board we
7:07
will find an am3 socket right where it belongs you've got support for all of
7:11
AMD's DDR3 CPUs so like I said before
7:15
x3s x2s x4s x6s X whatever you want next
7:20
we have support for dual Channel DDR3 and isus is also using their somewhat
7:24
unique uh RAM slots so the one side doesn't actually move back you just uncp
7:30
one side Slide the module into the one side put it down the rest of the way and
7:34
then clip it in so you only have to use one next we've got our 24 pin connector
7:39
along the side here right where it belongs and then right next to that
7:42
we've got probit so these are voltage readout points ground uh looks like
7:47
North Bridge Southbridge hyper transport
7:50
Northbridge vdd nb1 hm okay not sure RAM
7:55
CPU PLL CPU and then another ground point so that's that's a pretty cool
7:59
feature you can check all your voltages with a multimeter rather than relying on
8:03
unreliable BIOS level monitoring okay so
8:06
moving down we have oh this is kind of something that we should talk about we
8:10
have six SATA 6 gigabit per second ports
8:14
right there so those are all running off of the AMD chipset rather than using a
8:19
thirdparty chipset so that's one of the unique things about the brand new 800
8:23
series boards and then moving down we've got
8:26
the Republic of Gamers branding on our South Bridge heat sink there and let's
8:30
keep going down to the bottom so here's our front panel connectors and we've got
8:34
wow how many uh one two you know what I
8:38
actually can't tell what all of these are supposed to be it looks like any
8:42
number of okay yeah USB here USB USB and
8:47
I don't know what this one is so there you go all right here's all of our
8:51
buttons so we've got start and reset buttons on board here's the coreon
8:54
locker button and here is the overclock
8:58
button camera Man's phone is
9:01
ringing there we go okay you know what why don't we do something that I very
9:05
rarely do on this show and I'm actually going to consult the manual about
9:10
something yep right here on camera I'm going to attempt to find out what
9:14
something that I don't know what it does
9:17
does oh wow we're coming up on 10 minutes never mind I am not going to do
9:22
that unless I can find it really quickly forget it okay so let's move around to
9:25
the PCI Express slots we have 1 2 3 4 PCI e6x slots two PCI or PCIe PCI slots
9:33
and it actually says what these run at so this one runs at 4X this one runs at
9:37
either 16x or 8X this one runs at either
9:41
8X or H 1X and this one runs at 16x
9:46
regardless so let's go around to the back we can have a look at what
9:50
connectivity we have here we've got one PS2 keyboard Port we have 6 USB 2.0
9:54
ports we have a SOS clear button 2 USB
9:58
3. ports then we have optical audio out
10:02
firewire eSATA the Republic of Gamers
10:05
link and onboard 7.1 audio those look goldplated too that's pretty nice for
10:10
onboard audio thank you for checking out my unboxing of the Crosshair 4 formula
10:14
motherboard