Gadgetory

so I can't believe how many requests I've received to unbox the asou republic of gamers crosshair for formula motherboard and here it is so this motherboard is featuring AMD's latest 890 FX chipset and that means full support for phenom ii x4 x3 and not pictured here but also they're brand new fennan to x6 processors it has support for ATI crossfire X technology of course this board so it uses a very new sort of styling for Asus anywhere they've got kind of a it's hard to describe it but kind of an angular structure to their heat pipes we'll have a closer look at those when we get the board actually unboxed but it uses the black and red and white color scheme that we're used to with Republic of gamers boards so let's have a look up here at the top first of all we've got the ROG connect plug and overclock tweak it the hard core away so this part right here is for plugging in the ROG Kinect peripheral which you can use to overclock your system game first the speed you need to pone that is awesome and we will figure out what exactly that means but it appears to be the the onboard buttons here one of which is an overclock button one of which is a core unlocker button then you've got onboard start and reset buttons next we have mem okay any memory is okay its cameraman wants to go look at those fine there they are okay and then we have mem okay which is a pretty neat feature you can take any high-performance memory and you use this button to make sure that it'll post successfully in the board before you go in and adjust all of the timings to their extreme timings then we have supreme FX x5 built in so you've got built-in support for all of creatives XP technologies that's pretty nice to have for an onboard audio solution let's go around to the back of the box and see if there's anything that we didn't already see and there is not so let's get it opened up and have a look the accessories that are included with the crosshair for formula all right no no if I could get this box out and I would be able to talk to you about the accessories that are included with the crosshair for formula there we go so the top one contains the board and then the bottom one contains the accessories thumbs open next black box here and everything very nice so where should we start let me start with the i/o shield it has a Seuss's trademark black Republic of gamers i/o shield with their puffy silvery stuff on the inside next we have the ROG connect cable which is just a USB cable next we have a crossfire bridge it's kind of funny to see that included with a motherboard rather than with a video card normally it comes with the video card but hey having an extra one never hurts you got a few zip ties to do some cable management there you've got their cue connectors so if your case is kind of old and doesn't come with a proper brick USB connector then this is a great way to plug it in also for your front panel switches you can plug them into this little connector and then you can take the whole thing and plug it right into the motherboard next we've got the manual or the user guide I guess I could call it which has a whole bunch of stuff 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 eSATA USB 2.0 bracket for the back and then six SATA cables three of which are right angle and three of which are straight so each package contains one right angle and one straight SATA cable and then you've got your Republic of gamers sticker that you could put on your case or your cat or whatever you want to it's big put it on your car if you really wanted to I guess that'd be pretty sweet cruising down and you're like sweet ride with a Republic of gamers sticker on the side of your car yeah wish I had some shades of only talked about that feel like cool anyway so we have the drivers and utilities DVD don't use this download the latest off the SCS website then we have the user's guide which includes a bunch of stickers and information so these stickers are for labeling your SATA cables pretty cool they have a little diagram here for how to do it hard drive one boot disc you wrap it around your cable label it at both sides you will never be lost for which cable goes where ever again very neat feature and then we have a little pamphlet talking about turbo unlocker on-demand real-time system tuning so optimized CPU core loaded turbo and Locker is the next evolution of an exclusive this is performance boost feature one click and the turbo vivo interface automatically and dynamically just each to speed up performance okay so basically what they're doing is they're speeding up particular cores based on how much load is on that core that's what they're trying to do so if you have one core that's being used heavily by a game for example and another one that's being used just a little bit in the background then it'll adjust the frequency of the cores based on that sounds like a neat feature so here we go let's get the board opened up here a user's guide there and here it is that is one shiny looking motherboard like not literally shiny but shiny like like cool like cool shiny alright so the first thing we will find in the middle is wow this it's actually heavier than most motherboards to be perfectly honest with you I think it's these huge heat sinks that it has on it like the board has some real heft to it so these are like you know what I'm gonna talk about the heat sinks first since I'm oh no there's a backplate oh look we've got voltage regulators on the back it's only when they're using tons of phases that you typically see that kind of stuff on the back of the motherboard ok so moving around to the front we've got kind of these angular looking mosfet north bridge south bridge coolers i think they're very very cool and here cameraman maybe you can adjust the camera to get kind of a good look at them it's hard to really describe what this style is like I was calling their old stock like fortress of solitude style I don't really know what to call this but it looks very futuristic and sleek I really like it you've actually got a heat pipe connecting this heat sink to the Northbridge heat sink down to the Southbridge heat sink so you got one flat heat pipe running there so make sure that everything stays nice and cool honestly there's nothing here that's gonna get particularly hot anyway so that's why asus is able to take a little bit more liberty with their design choices and make it sort of look cool up at the top of the board will find our 8 pin sepia CPU power connector right where it belongs I've actually had quite a few people ask me about this little this little 4 pin cover here the 4 pin cover is so that if you're using a power supply that only has a 4 pin connector you can plug it in to just these four and the board will still function so if you have an 8 pin power connector on your power supply you should remove this tab plug in all eight pins in the middle of the board we will find an am-3 socket right where it belongs we've got support for all of AMD's ddr3 CPUs so like I said before X 3 X 2 X 4 X 6 is X whatever you want next we have support for dual channel ddr3 and Zeus is also using their somewhat unique Ram slots so the one side doesn't actually move back you just unclip one side slide the module in to the one side put it down the rest of the way and then clip it in so you only have to use one next we've got our 24 pin connector along the side here right where it belongs and then right next to that we've got probit so these aren't adrene out points ground looks like North Bridge South Bridge hypertransport North Bridge VDD nb1 hmm okay I'm not sure Ram CPU PLL CPU and then another ground point so that's that's a pretty cool feature you can check all your voltages with a multimeter rather than relying on unreliable BIOS level monitoring ok so moving down we have oh this is kind of something that we should talk about we have 6 SATA 6 gigabits per second ports right there so those are all running off of the AMD chipset rather than using a third-party chipset so that's one of the unique things about the brand-new 800 series boards and then moving down we've got the Republican gamer's branding on our Selfridge heatsink there and let's keep going down to the bottom so here's our front panel connectors and we've got Wow how many one two you know what I actually can't tell what all of these are supposed to be it looks like any number of okay yeah USB here USB USB and I don't know what this one is so there you go alright here's all of our buttons so we've got start and reset buttons on board here's the core on Locker button and here is the overclock button camera man's phone is ringing there we go okay you know what why don't we do something that I very rarely do on this show I'm actually going to consult the manual about something yep right here on camera I'm gonna attempt to find out what's something that I don't know what it does does oh whoa we're coming up on ten minutes never mind I am NOT going to do that unless I can find it really quickly forget it okay so let's move around to the PCI Express slots we have one two three four PCIe 16x slots two PCIe our PCIe PCI slots and it actually says what these run at so this one runs at four X this one runs at either 16x or eight X this one runs at either eight X or 1x and this one runs at 16x regardless so let's go around to the back we could have a look at what connectivity we have here we've got one ps2 keyboard port we have six USB 2.0 ports we have I see most clear button two USB 3.0 ports then we have optical audio out firewire eSATA the Republic of gamers link and onboard 7.1 audio those look gold-plated - that's pretty nice for onboard audio thank you for checking out my unboxing of the crosshair for formula motherboard