Gadgetory

so today I'll be having a look at a motherboard for masseuse this is the m4 a 79 x TD Evo so this is part of their extreme design philosophy of motherboard building so let's have a quick look at what all of that means extreme design means that they're going for number one performance number one reliability and number one safety so Safety refers to things like low EMI so that's electromagnetic interference emissions okay it's got instant performance up with the turbo key so that's how they're achieving their number one performance goal and the number one reliability is achieved using extreme durable solid capacitors as well as stat cool three so stat cool three puts a whole lot of copper in the PCB which enables heat to be dissipated more evenly not just by the heat sinks attached but also by the PCB of the motherboard itself now this is a 790 X chipset board which means we've got support for crossfire up two quad cross crossfire X we have support for fen and 2 X 3 and 10 M 2 X 4 also with a BIOS update you have full support for AMD's latest venom 2 X 6 processors new features Express gate which is an instant-on feature that enables you to access games productivity and internet no no no no that's something else unrelated it allows you to access Skype and internet browsers some basic stuff without actually booting up into Windows 7 which it is completely ready for as you can see from the sticker there ok moving around to the back of the box we've got a whole bagel list of stuff that it does so ddr3 1800s overclocking 8 plus 2 face power we've got a whole lot of other stuff here 8 channel audio stylish heatsink they actually call that out right on the box which I agree with by the way turbo key energy surge protection that's kind of neat ok so moving around here what do we got we got the new gen 8 plus 2 phase power and I wish I could get the lighting just right here so you can read that it's not so bad there we go okay so six plus two phase power breakthrough power designed to fully unleash CPU potential okay then we have EPU which is a system level energy efficiency so that's natural chip on the motherboard that takes care of making sure that your system is staying as efficient as possible and then turbo va0 time overclocking tuning tunings hey we're closed okay so let's open up this box and have a look at what we find inside first thing I find is the acute connectors so you can use that to install all of your front panel case connectors on and then you can plug the whole brick right into your motherboard very convenient then we have a user's manual and okay so user guide which contains a drivers and utilities DVD don't use that download the latest off these suits website I'm starting to sound like a broken record saying that maybe I'll stop no okay so in here this is all English contains information about azusa's software cue fan as well as their other stuff how to create a raid volume how to install all of your hardware on the motherboard very nice Thank You masseuse then we have an i/o shield it's not color coded just as plain silver one but it does have they're they're mushy backplate cover then we have four SATA 2 cables so these are two right angle and two straight cables which I will allow you to see by holding them up here there we go then we have one IDE cable alright alright let's get some other board out of the box and the first thing I notice about it is definitely these stylish heat sinks that is for sure now this is a little bit different than the heat sinks that I've seen on any of the suits motherboards that I have previously unboxed and it's not quite there Fortress of Solitude style nor is it there there they're new sort of more more angular style that you see on the Republic of gamers boards but this is more like a wavy design how long you can see that there you go and so the the Northbridge is quite similar it's actually like a two-tone color scheme so you can see there's like a black base and then kind of a wavy blue part that comes out very unique looking on like to see a black PCB that always sort of makes a build look more sharp very nice all right so let's start with the basic features you got an am-3 socket with support for dual channel ddr3 that's fairly standard that's what you expect up at the top you've got a four pin CPU power connector right where it belongs top left over on the right you've got a 24 pin power connector again right where it belongs then let's move around to you know what I'm just gonna like stand here in front of the camera it's a little bit easier on my positioning ok so there's nothing else really all that interesting up on the top this does not feature the memo okay button but I mean really ddr3 compatibility is so good these days with all the platforms that I've played with you don't have to worry too much about it we've got one IDE port here as well as wow multitude of SATA ports so ok these four are gonna be running off of the chipset and then these three are gonna be running off of somewhere else unless there are six running off of the chipset you know what I'm not gonna guess we're gonna have one two three four five six seven SATA to ports down here in the bottom left you can see that these two are on a right angle so this is sort of the ideal configuration in my mind but I can see why Isis didn't worry about making all of these ones right angle because your PCI Express slots are positioned quite high up on the board so even if you have a dual slot card installed here it's not going to interfere with these SATA ports so it's not that big of a deal next here we've got our USB 2.0 front panel connectors and then we have a firewire front panel connector now this is an odd one I don't remember a time that I've seen a front header so start reset hard drive LED power LED I don't remember a time that I've seen it here on annecy sport very odd normally a SUSE puts it right here and it's sort of always there here we've got the chassis intrusion detects as well as an over-voltage um per then we have our front panel audio in its ideal location then okay PCI Express expansion slots we have two PCIe 16 supporting crossfire X if you install two dual slot cards you're gonna end up with one PCIe 1x and one PCI slot that is definitely the ideal configuration for those slots moving up here we have a common header okay pretty nice then we move around to the back of the board where we find the i/o for the back panel to ps2 ports I personally still like to see these on a board they don't take up that much space although some people complain about it then we have one two three four five six seven eight USB 2.0 ports no support for USB 3.0 but this is a fairly budget oriented board it's like a budget gaming platform so it looks good performs good but you're missing some of the frills and gimmicks then we have optical audio out eSATA which is really nice to see firewire Gigabit Ethernet as well as 7.1 audio thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the m4 a7 9 x TV Evo