Gadgetory

yes many requests for this one many many requests this is the crosshair for extreme and it contains all of the latest technologies in fact some that have been around for a while but just took well a lot of months to actually be implemented on anything this has the hydrologic engine by lucid so what that means is that you have support for oh not only ATI CrossFireX but also multi GPU support for mix and match here up here so cross links 3 technology mix and match vendors and cards and whatever else you could possibly want to mix and match for graphics cards so experience true graphics freedom you can run 2 Radeon cards you can run two geforce card you can run a g-force and Radeon you can run mismatched geforce cards or match geforce cards it doesn't matter it's not an SLI ready motherboard please note the absence of an SLI logo this is an AMD board with an AMD 890 FX chipset but you can still run to geforce cards thanks to the hydrologic chipset right there from loosen okay it's a republic of gamers port so you've got ROG connect so you can plug in another computer and you can make any changes to the system settings that you could want to it has USB bios flashback that would be really nice actually that's a cool feature so you just throw a USB with the BIOS on it you plug it into the back and you boot up and it restores it very cool you've got oh yeah I believe that one is so that you can use bluetooth to overclock through your phone or something like that so that's a pretty neat feature if you're into that and 3dmark Vantage Advanced Edition is included let's have a look at the back of the box and see what they have to say it's all of the exact same stuff Wow okay five PCIe 16x slots now we're gonna have to have a look at the manual for a change I know I don't think I've ever actually shown you the manual for a motherboard during an unboxing but we're gonna have to do that to find out exactly how the hydrologic and splits up those PCI Express Lanes because it actually acts as as an intermediary between the chipset and the graphics cards and that's how it performs its magic where it takes two mismatched cards and and takes the performance of them and adds them together and makes more performance so let's have a look at the accessories first we have what on earth is this we'll be back in a moment this is a Bluetooth riser card I got it figured out we have a USB cable for rog connect we've got an i/o shield which is black looks cool we have some temperature probes very nice you have some cable ties we have cute connectors we have a crossfire bridge we have voltage readout little plugs and you plug those into the board and then you plug your multimeter into there and you can read the voltages of a bunch of various aspects of the board we have a firewire USB IO PCI backplate you have one into these three bags of two so that's a total of six SATA 3 cables and then we have to say to two cables please note those cables are identical other than the color we have a crosshair for extreme motherboard DVD which you should throw away and download the latest from the Zeus website and we have labels for your SATA cables as well as the manual so give me a moment I'm gonna look this up in audio as you can see this is a very complicated chart and hold on cameraman don't move the camera look at this paragraph so that if people want to they can freeze the video and read it don't move don't move don't zoom steady unsteady hands government there you go okay so basically what happens is if you want to run crossfire just native crossfire you use PCIe slots 1 & 3 okay if you run want to run lucid Hydra okay so that's ATI Nvidia or X which is mixed multi-gpu mode then you can use any one of these combinations here crossfire X will also work with these columns with these combinations but if you run it natively is here depending where you want to install your theoretical raid card or other PCIe peripheral you can get varying widths for the PCIe lanes so you can get up to 16 X 16 X 16 X fourth triple VGA mode and then if you want to run prod VGA you'll have to settle for 16 16 8 and 8 so there you have it let's keep going with this unboxing and we'll have a look at the board itself that is really like yeah I don't know it throws a lot of it looks like it probably threw a lot of complications into the engineering process I mean when you're figuring out how to how to optimize you know which ones are running off the bridge chip and which ones are running natively off the chipset and like all this stuff it's a miracle they managed to make up words like this at all actually and a high-end one no less look at that okay so that is a very very nice-looking board so why don't we start with the general layout the first thing we're gonna find on this board is a CPU socket that's name three socket compatible with the latest quad core and six core CPUs from AMD up here in the top left you will find an 8 pin CPU power connector as well as a very elaborate looking PWM and chipset cooling solution so you can see there's a heat pipe actually I'm gonna get you to get a slightly different angle on this first of all there's fins down here and then there's thicker fins up here ok so you can see the heat pipe is running all the way through here down this way under here over here and then down to the South Bridge and that is actually where the hydrologic tip resides if I recall correctly let me have a look I believe it is oh it could also be here hmm this could be trouble well not sure exactly where it is my guess would be here though okay and you can actually see there is a cooling fan inside here as well and it is plugged in right there so that is probably one of the most complicated cooling solutions I have seen on an assist board in a very long time because it is an am-3 socket board you support for dual channel ddr3 memory up to 16 gigs you've got on board Hey look at that pour on Locker button that makes it easy doesn't it then you've got start reset as well as switches for all the PCI Express slots you know what this can be a lifesaver if you have water cooling if you're using full cover blocks it's almost impossible to remove one card and not another one so if you're trying to reach out to troubleshoot like a dead card or anything like that this can like seriously it's worth its weight in gold you've got probit which is where you can find out the voltages from a bunch of different aspects of the board so you've got a ground here you've got CPU PLL CPU RAM Northbridge um you know a bunch of other stuff too that's great you got a bill button I think that's actually the memo okay button okay and then we've got our 24-pin power along the right-hand edge of the board exactly where it belongs then we have SATA and they're specifically labeling these as optical drive I guess that's because they're SATA 2 because the other six ports are actually SATA 3 six gigabit per second ports all right let's keep going down you can see we've got dual BIOS chips here as well as a CMOS Clear button then we have our front panel connectors a couple of hmm a couple of USB headers presumably okay so nine ten seven eight okay and then I'm not sure what the others are okay that's fine all four pin fan connectors on this particular board and there are quite a few of them and then we've got a couple of auxiliary molex connectors so there's one here one up here over by that chipset so that means if you're loading this up with five GPUs I mean remember this this plug here was not designed to provide that much power through the slots on the motherboard so a soos is gone ahead and augmented it with a couple of additional molex plug now if you're only running one or two cards it's probably fine not to plug these in but if you are loading it up with five high power cards definitely plug those into your power supply let's go around and have a look at the back of the board on the i/o panel so we have a ps2 port which I personally still like to see just because sometimes USB keyboards can be a little bit finicky you're running an unstable overclock we've got one two three four five six USB 2.0 ports a CMOS clear optical audio out that looks like a powered eSATA port as well as a regular eSATA port we have two USB 3.0 ports Gigabit Ethernet rog connect and 7.1 analog audio out thank you oh-ah no no not thank you thank you I mean thank you but also check this out so we got our one two three these are our normal ATX mounting holes but wait there's more this is not an e ATX board but because I need to eat a export it would probably be about here and would have one more screw but it is actually wider than an ATX board so bear that in mind if your case is not a little bit wider it's not going to fit this motherboard thank you for checking out this unboxing and first look and don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips for more cool stuff like this the lucid chip is here cameraman and I work together this is a South Bridge this is the lucid hydrologic chip and this is the North Bridge thank you for watching