Gadgetory

welcome to my unboxing of the crosshair for formula this is a 990 X motherboard it's an AMD motherboard it's the crosshair branding on the Republic of gamers it is compatible with all the latest am-3 CPUs and that one's got thermal contact all over it not going to show that off too much but it is also compatible with upcoming am3+ CPUs so that means we're going to be able to put so far undisclosed unreleased CPUs into this motherboard with no complications very very cool so socket am3+ supports 32 nanometer CPU up to 8 cores ok well they're going to go ahead and say it then it's cool and quiet up to 140 watt CPU support here we go 3 PCI e 2.0 16x so add up to 16 dual 16x or 16 8 8 so that means you got full support for 3 way graphics technologies using PCIe 8 X native bandwidth for all three which means you're not going to see any performance degradation supports a 3-way nvidia sli and crossfire x technology okay we've got support for six a two three six gigabit per second ports as well as an additional as media controller with giving us an external 6 a 2 6 gigabit per second so the eSATA on this board is actually say 2 3 6 gigabit per second that's kind of cool so if you had like a super high-speed SSD as an external drive you could get the most out of it ok Intel Gigabit LAN that's kind of interesting on an AMD board but yeah I support that decision Intel LAN is very well-regarded and we have an AZ media USB 3 controller giving us 4 at the back and two at the mid board ok let's go ahead and get this guy opened up and I guess I spoiled my big surprise on the back there and that is that yes this board has full support for nvidia sli technology on an AMD chipset Wow so supports crossfire X and SLI it's got ROG connect which means you can plug in to an external computer and you can control the settings of the board itself it has extreme engine digi+ which is their combination of analog and digital design elements for the PWM it's got game first which is the Intel Ethernet which is in theory lower latency and faster supreme FX X 5 - ok and that pretty much does it out includes daemon tools interesting I like daemon tools good my free copy that with my motherboard ok so open this baby up and see what we got for you so we have six a two three six gigabit per second cables that saw they are all straight to right angle - all right angle cables crossfire bridge SLI bridge this still amuses me that there's s alot compatibility on this board we have Q connectors so that is for the front panel headers as well as one of the front USB - headers we got some zip ties included you got an i/o shield with their puffy shiny backing on it we have a crosshair five formula series user guide as well as a drivers and utilities DVD download the latest from the Seuss website we also have their handy cable labels so when you're bundling cables and routing them all somewhere you won't lose track of which is which when you're plugging them into your drive we've got a Quick Start Guide we have one of those huge ROG stickers that your I guess you put on the side of your case yeah I'm not not real sold on the ROG sticker it's all good we got a 3-way SLI bridge included and finally the ROG connect cable which is just a straight USB a to a cable now let's have a look at the board itself so this is as with all of a Seuss's rog republic of gamers boards it is a very high-end board it looks high-end it feels high-end and it performs high-end you can take that to the bank this thing actually looks great this is one of the better-looking ROG boards that I have that I have ever seen so why don't we start with the CPU socket area so here you can see we have a black socket they're calling it a and 3b so this is an am3+ socket it is fully compatible with am3+ CPUs as indicated by the black color we also have the standard AMD mounting mechanism around it although you can see it's missing those those pieces of plastic that bridge it together no big deal it uses the same mounting holes the same mounting clips this is going to be fully compatible with pretty much any AMD CPU cooler going back several socket generations we have a really slick looking PWM cooler here with a heat pipe running down the middle of it so it's got a kind of a matte black and anodized red finish to it it looks really good so you can actually see the chipset down there so this is cooling both the chipset as well as the PWM now this I haven't seen yet so I have an 8 pin CPU power connector and it's ideal location on the top left edge of the board and I also have a four pin so it looks like a soos is allowing you to deliver a tremendous amount of power to the CPU socket but they have not opted to go with dual eight pins which we have seen on some high-end boards in the past so there's probably a reason for it but there you go so you've got one 8 pin and one 4 pin CPU power connector ok I'm going to do all the fan headers later because there seems to be a ton of them we've got a go button we've got four dual channel ddr3 slots so these are easy install slots which means there's no clip on the one side you slide the module in like this push it down clip it in just like that alright here we've got our 24 pin connector in its ideal location along the right-hand edge and there's the mid board USB 3 connector so this is a great location for this I very much prefer this to having it down here because this is closer to the front of your case which is where it should be alright we have 6 SATA 3 6 gigabit per second ports that are running off of the AMD control which is under this heatsink and then we have this one running off of a custom chip so that's a third-party chip I would use all of these before I go and use this one here's our front panel connectors so your power switch your LEDs all that good stuff we've got 2 USB 2.0 front panel connectors we've got an over C button we have a start and reset switch built in love these these are very handy for me and then we have front panel audio here's the x5 supreme FX and moving up we've also got this which is good this is a four pin auxilary power connector if you're actually going to load four six cards or even three into this board you should probably be using this okay we have an ROG connect switch over here so what that is for is for using the external computer to change settings on your board so you'll just turn that on you plug into the ROG connect port right there this is not a normal USB port and it's off to the races now this board has six expansion slots total so you can see the top slot spot is empty you've got four PCIe 16x slots so these are capable of running at up to 16 8 X 8 X 4 3-way SLI or crossfire you have one PCIe 1x slot one PCI slot in addition to those and I did promise to tell you guys about all of the four pin fan headers on this board there's a ton there's one two three four up here in the top right corner okay then there's one two down here up three down here along the bottom edge so that's six point seven so far and finally one at the back here for your chassis fan so that's eight four pin pwm fan controllers outstanding alright let's have a look at the i/o shield at the back we got four USB 3.0 ports so that is a total of six one ps2 keyboard mouse combo port a clear CMOS button this is the best place in the world for a clear CMOS button big fan okay we've got one two three four five six seven USB 2.0 ports eSATA that's running say two three six gigabit per second I remind you optical audio out more USB 3 the rog connect the intel Gigabit LAN and then do those look gold-plated we got gold plated 7.1 audio outs what that means is these are going to be more robust more durable connectors than you would see if they were not gold plated the mounting mechanism for the chipset and PWM heat sinks is outstanding we've actually got back plates on here that are using thermal interface material to in all likelihood interface with thermal heat producing components on the back of the board we've also got a nice robust metal AMD backplate to go along with the plastic clips on the front so those are going to be very very solid thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the crosshair 5 formula don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech Terron boxing's reviews and other computer videos