Asus M4A89GTD PRO 890GX Crossfire SATA3 6.0Gb/s Motherboard Unboxing & First Look
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2010-05-08
·
1,366 words · ~6 min read
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so today i'm going to be doing a quick unboxing and first look at the ASUS
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m4a89 gtd pro motherboard the biggest
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difference between this one and their other 890 gx motherboard is
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that the other one has slash usb 3. so
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the 890 gx chipset is AMD's latest chipset for their phenom 2 phantom 3
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phenom athlon 2 all of their different cpus okay
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and what it brings to the table more than anything else is support for sata36
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gigabit per second now right now SATA 3 and usb 3 are really hot features
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everyone wants to have them but this chipset doesn't have integrated support
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for usb3 so that means it's up to the motherboard manufacturers to build that
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in using a third-party chipset so that's why this one does not include usb 3 but
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it does include SATA 6 gigabit per second support and you can see i think
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they're actually using completely the same box for these boards even i don't i
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don't think they've made like they've made a couple changes they've added a
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bar for usb 3 here and then that's about it so anyway this is going to be fairly
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similar to the one we already did for the pro slash usb 3 but why don't we
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open this up and do a quick unboxing here anyway so we've got an i o shield
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which includes their foamy padding at the back then we've got a user's guide which also
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has a little addendum about the vga switch card so that's this guy right
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here when you have one graphics card installed you should put the vga switch
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card into the other PCIe 16x slot and
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that will allow the board to function properly if you
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have two graphics cards in crossfire mode then it's fine to remove this and
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install another graphics card just make sure you don't lose it in case you ever
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want to go back to single graphics in the future next we've got the driver dvd don't use
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this install the latest off ASUS.com inside the user's guide you'll find the
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usual stuff including a motherboard overview some basics on how to plug everything in
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and i mean ASUS does a pretty good job of their motherboard manual so you
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should find everything you need in there next we've got four SATA cables
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including their cool i'm guessing these are SATA yeah these are labeled SATA six
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gigabit per second cables there's one straight and one right angle and then
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for the regular SATA two cables you've got one straight one right angle what i
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suspect is that the SATA two cables would work just fine for sata3 anyway
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but there you there you go these ones look cooler so
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yeah next we've got an ide cable and then we
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have their q connector so we have one usb and one for the front uh power hard
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drive led reset switch all that good stuff
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then let's get the board out itself it seems like most of our viewers were
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overwhelmingly in favor of the cameraman's view on uh on this this
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chipset heatsink so they do not think it looks like a tree or like a wave or like
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a green initiative sort of thing so i stand corrected i suppose but let's have
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a look at the overall layout of this board this is an am3 socket that means
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you've got support for ddr3 in dual
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channel configurations so up to 16 gigabytes i believe would be the spec
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for this particular board you've got a fair amount of room around the socket
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you can see that these mosfet and northbridge coolers don't actually go up
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all that high so if you're using like a good size tower heatsink you don't have
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to worry too much about there being any clearance issues there now let's keep
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moving our way around you've got ASUS proprietary ddr3
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dim slots so that means that the one end here is not actually a clip so you just
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slide the RAM in that side put it down into the other side and then clip it
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closed up here we've got our buttons for the turbo key2 as well as the core
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unlocker now core on locker is a huge feature for ASUS 890 gx boards because
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the other manufacturers at the time of filming this video do not have support
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for core unlocking and that's what a lot of people are doing with the lower end
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dual core and triple core AMD processors is they're actually able to turn off or
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turn on the uh the locked course so am
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ASUS has managed to get around AMD's restriction and they have enabled that
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feature on their 890 gx boards turbo key2 is kind of like what it sounds like
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makes the board go faster okay so memo k
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is their technology to make sure that no matter what kind of RAM you're running
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in here if you press this button it'll set it to safe settings which will allow
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you to post the board and configure it the way that you want the 24 connector
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as well as the eight pin connector are in their ideal locations at the right
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hand edge and the top of the board this
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is a really weird 8-pin connector i've never seen one like this before it's
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very tall that is all
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all right so then let's move around here is the chipset itself so that's where
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our status six gigabit per second ports you can see they're labeled here
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are running off of so we have one two three four five six SATA six gigabit per
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second ports here is your front panel hookups then you've got an ide port
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right here here we have a ton of usb 2.0
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connectivity so you could hook up like a card reader uh four front usb ports and
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even like uh like a fan controller like a
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m-cube t-balancer or something and have them all hooked up all at the same time
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without any third party cards then we've got our pci and pci express slot layout
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i really like this layout you've got two PCIe 16x slots those are crossfire ready
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then you've got a 1x slot as well as a pci slot that would be covered by dual
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slot graphics so after you got your crossfire cards and you have access to
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one pci express 4x slot and one pci slot
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i think that's a good mix for a board like this then let's move around to the
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back where we have the rest of our connectivity
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okay so we've got a ps2 port that's for keyboard then we've got one two three
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four usb 2.0 ports but then it gets a little
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bit sketchier so why don't we do this first and then we'll move over there so
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we have one optical audio out HDMI dvi
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vga then we have a firewire port gigabit
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lan and 7.1 audio now here's where it gets a little bit more confusing these
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two blue ports on the usb 3 model are actually usb 3 ports they are not
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labeled usb 3 ports and you can see that the usb 3 chipset is missing so those
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are usb 2 ports they are not usb 3 even
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though they are color coded blue this is also a usb port but it is a usb 2 slash
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e-SATA port that means that both kinds of connectors will actually fit in here
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and will operate with this particular slot you've got 7.1 audio as well as
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gigabit lan and thank you for checking out my unboxing of the m489 gtd pro not
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usb 3.