Gadgetory

so today we'll be unboxing gigabytes cream of the cream for 890 FX motherboards so this is their highest end AMD motherboard for the moment that means that it has support for AMD's FEM 2 X 6 X 4 or really anything else that fits in an am-3 socket should you so desire as I said before it uses the 890 FX chipset so that means you've got support for crossfire X up to 4-way so actually why don't we go through all of gigabytes interesting technologies they've got outlined on the front this is a new thing on/off charge that means that there are certain USB ports on the board that will actually support charging attached USB devices in this case they've got an iPhone attached to it even when the computer is off and one of the reasons they're able to do that is due to their 3 3 3 ik text technology which is USB power 3x so they've really updated the way that they deliver power to the USB ports they deliver three times the specified power capability I mean you're not going to be over juicing all of your components but it can provide up to three times the amount of power even while the systems off very cool you've also got support for USB 3 as well as SATA 3 as part of their 3-3-3 thing you also have a three year warranty they should call it like three three three three in Canada and ultra durable three it should be like five threes how about how many more three things can we do okay I don't see much else they've got auto and lock so that means that you can do core unlocking on this motherboard which I have covered a couple of times in the past how to do that before wit crossfire say two three six gig oh right it has Southbridge 850 so that means you've got six SATA three ports so that is supported natively by AMD's chipset gigabyte actually did not have to add a third-party chipset to this particular motherboard like they have to on the Intel boards so over here we've got some more outlines of the mostly the same features but here's a different one silent hybrid silent pipe - so this is a little liked our heats blush and say little it's a huge tower heat same thing that you strap to the Northbridge in order to get better cooling in my experience with the old x58 extreme it wasn't necessary but it did provide better cooling to the Northbridge as well as the MOSFETs because it's all connected by heat pipes on the back I don't see okay on board quick switch so you've got on board switches you've got an onboard debug LED dual LAN ports and that pretty much covers everything that I see on the back here okay cool so let's get this opened up go bucs I love gigabytes high-end boxes they just like they're a little bit busy you know but thanks however everything's so well it makes my life easier I don't think I ever said what the board is called it's the 890 FX au d7 so u d7 puts it right up in the top tier of gigabyte motherboards alright let's get this open so I'm gonna take the board away from your interested eyes first here and then we'll have a look at the accessories that are included first so okay I have a team gigabyte do an accessory box like this before this is kind of unique so you pull it apart like this and then you can see what is inside so we have a user's mail we have a sticker there's a powered by gigabyte sticker okay then we have a user's manual as well as a driver and utilities DVD so you should download the latest off the site don't use this DVD and then in here this is fully in English so its covers everything from BIOS configuration to probably even installing drivers and some basic troubleshooting all that good stuff where to plug in all of your front headers I think I missed one here here's the multilingual installation guide books so this covers the physical installation and is in a variety of different languages and inside there I also found the Dolby home theater sticker very nice okay in the other side of this pack here I have more stuff so first I have a crossfire bridge across space fire okay that's very interesting and the top is unlabeled and then I have another crossfire bridge right okay I guess you could potentially need a couple of bridges if you're gonna be configuring quad crossfire okay next we have some SATA cables ooh these are nice actually gigabytes moving away while partially from their yellow SATA cables to something that actually matches the motherboard go figure beautiful I love it too straight and to right angle and then we've also got an IDE cable included next we have their eSATA bracket I really like these things it's a very convenient way to just add more eSATA cables or at add more eSATA ports to your computer and then there's also a little power thing as well as an external power adapter so this is one molex to 2 SATA power so with this bracket and this cable you can plug in two external hard drives very cool and they also include 2 e SATA cables for you as well this is a far more complete kit than they used to include next we've got an i/o shield which handily labels all of the interesting stuff on the back so that's ok we'll cover that more later okay let's get this motherboard opened up here on top then you have the hybrid pipe - let me see if I can get this open yeah you can probably see it pretty good anyway so here's what you do you shake it so there's thermal compound included as well as four screws and so see these four holes right here those are gonna strap on to the Northbridge right about where that water block is located right now so gigabyte gives you the option and it comes with the water block installed by default of either and this is why it's called hybrid using this big tower heat pipe cooler thing which actually mounts to a PCI bracket at the back ok so then it mounts on to here and then goes all the way to the back of the motherboard like this looks like that ok or you can leave the default water cooling solution on which is an all copper affair so you don't have to worry about it dunking up your your your water loop if you have to you know click on any other blocks up to it and then I don't know where I was going with that it has included water cooling ok 3/8 inch barbs so it'll be compatible with most high-end water cooling systems as long as you're not using overkill half inch barbs here's a little USB 3 sticker ok let's have a look at the layout of the board in the center we find it it's ideal location the am-3 socket so by an am-3 bracket this board uses a +2 phase power as I recall but I can double check that before I wrap up the video if I remember in the top left corner we've got our 8 pin power and it's ideal location we've got CPU fin this board does not use for pin puffs and connectors all over so that's a feature that's pretty cool but not included on this one we've got two dual channel sets of ddr3 memory support so that's going to support up to 16 gigs of RAM with current 4 gig dims then we have onboard power and reset switches this is a breath of fresh air that is the right place for an onboard switch because when you've got 4 graphics cards installed which you know if you have a lot of money you would most of the on-board switches are down here you got a graphics card here how you gonna access it no this is perfect because here you're plugging in the 24 15 connector there won't be anything else around there very nice then we've got an IDE cable floppy cable connector then down moving a little bit further we've got a clear CMOS which covered by a little protective plastic cover this is also a much better location for this than I've seen many times in the past while it's not quite as good as the back panel it's way better than having like you know some stupid little jumper hidden like here which I've seen many many many times ok next we've got our SATA ports so this is SATA 2 right here we've got 2 SATA 2 ports so you can use those for your optical drives or anything right you don't care how fast they go and then you've got 6 SATA 3 6 gigabit per second ports very nice here's our onboard debug LED and yeah someone was knocking on the door but I think they figured out that I'm shooting a video right now here's our front panel connectors as well as our front USB 1 2 3 we've got three front headers for USB then we have one front header for firewire and one for comb ok alright PCI Express configuration this is where it starts to get interesting you see all these little chips in here those are going to be splitting apart the PCI Express Lanes provided with this chipset so if you want to run to 16 X cards at 16 X speed you're going to be using this top port and then this one down here so if you're running dual crossfire you're going to cover up these two and these - so that will leave you a PCI Express 8x port a PCI Express for export as well as a PCI Express 8x port okay so just just to be clear if you're running for you're gonna cover this one again here so you'll be running in 16 X 8 X 16 X + 8 X and it's quite possible that it's going to split it eight eight eight eight but I'm not actually a hundred percent sure either way as long as you're running eight X are above you are not going to run into any performance disadvantages so let's just have a quick look at the cooling solution on the South Bridge I mean that's a pretty weak cooler but it looks really neat and since that self bridge doesn't kick off a whole lot of heat it totally doesn't matter I like it then we've got our North Bridge cooling solution here which I've talked about enough I think and then our MOSFET cooler so that cools the one two three four five six seven eight plus two phase power design on this motherboard now let's have a quick look at our iOS yield at the back so USB 2.0 ports we've got one two three four five six seven eight now these are those USB 2.0 / eSATA ports so we've actually got two eSATA ports on the back and then they include that bracket you can have up to four eSATA ports on this board very cool we have a ps2 mouse keyboard combo port digital audio out in both optical and coaxial flavours firewire another firewire two Gigabit Ethernet USB 3.0 as well as 7.1 audio now I wish they labeled which USB ports can be used for charging but I guess we'll go ahead and assume that at least some of them can and too bad for me thank you for checking out my unboxing of the 890 fxa ud7 from gigabyte