 So I can't believe how many requests I've received to unbox the ASUS Republic of Gamers Crosshair 4 Formula Motherboard and here it is. So this motherboard is featuring AMD's latest 890FX chipset and that means full support for Phenom 2 X4, X3 and not pictured here, but also their brand new Phenom 2 X6 processors. It has support for ATI Crossfire X technology, of course, and let's have a look at this board. So it uses a very new sort of styling for ASUS, where 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 Gamer 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 hardcore way. So this port right here is for plugging in the ROG Connect peripheral, which you can use to overclock your system. Game first, the speed you need to pwn. That is awesome and we will figure out what exactly that means, but it appears to be 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 Memo K. Any memory is okay. Oh, this cameraman wants to go look at those. Fine. There they are. Okay. And then we have Memo K, 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 SupremeFX X-Fi built in. So you've got built in support for all of creatives X-Fi 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 at the accessories that are included with the Crosshair 4 formula. All right. If I could get this box out, then I would be able to talk to you about the accessories that are included with the Crosshair 4 formula. There we go. So the top one contains the board and then the bottom one contains the accessories. Comes open. We've got a nice black box here and everything. Very nice. So where should we start? Why don't we start with the I.O. Shield? It has ASUS'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 a 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 Q 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 in your like sweet ride with a Republic of Gamers sticker on the side of your car. Yeah. Wish I had some shades while I talk about that. It'd be all like cool. Anyway, so we have the drivers and utilities DVD. Don't use this. Download the latest off the ASUS 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 disk. 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 optimize CPU core loaded turbo unlockers. The next evolution of an exclusive this is performance boost feature. One click on the turbo V Evo interface automatically and dynamically adjust each speed of 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. 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. All right. 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 going to talk about the heat sinks first since I'm oh, no, there's a back plate. 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. Okay. 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 style the like fortress of solitude style. And 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 North Bridge heat sink down to the South Bridge heat sink. So you've got one flat heat pipe running there. So make sure that everything stays nice and cool. Honestly, there's nothing here that's going to 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, we'll find our eight pin CPU power connector right where it belongs. I've actually had quite a few people ask me about this little four pin cover here. The four pin cover is so that if you're using a power supply that only has a four pin connector, you can plug it in to just these four. And the board will still function. So if you have an eight 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 AM3 socket right where it belongs. You've got support for all of AMD's DDR3 CPUs. So like I said before, X3s, X2s, X4s, X6s, X whatever you want. Next, we have support for dual channel DDR3. And ASUS 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 into 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 are voltage readout points. Ground looks like Northbridge, Southbridge, Hyper Transport, Northbridge, VDDNB1. OK, I'm not sure. RAM, CPU, PLL, CPU, and then another ground point. So that's a pretty cool feature. 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 six SATA, six gigabit 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 Republic of Gamers branding on our Southbridge 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... OK, yeah, USB here, USB, USB, and I don't know what this one is. So there you go. All right, here's all of our buttons. So we've got start and reset buttons on board. Here's the core unlocker button. And here is the overclock button. The cameraman's phone is ringing. There we go. OK, 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 going to attempt to find out what something that I don't know what it does does. Oh, wow, we're coming up on 10 minutes. Never mind. I am not going to do that unless I can find it really quickly. OK, so let's move around to the PCI Express slots. We have one, two, three, four PCIe 16x slots, two PCIe... Or PCIe, PCI slots. And it actually says what these run at. So this one runs at 4x, this one runs at either 16x or 8x. This one runs at either 8x or 1x. And this one runs at 16x regardless. So let's go around to the back. We can 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 a CMOS 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 too. That's pretty nice for onboard audio. Thank you for checking out my unboxing of the Crosshair 4 Formula motherboard.