 Welcome to my unboxing of the Crosshair 4 formula. This is a 990X motherboard. It's an AMD motherboard, hence the Crosshair branding on the Republic of Gamers. It is compatible with all the latest AM3 CPUs. That one's got thermal compound all over it, so I'm not going to show that off too much. But it is also compatible with upcoming AM3 Plus 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 AM2 Plus supports 32nm CPU up to 8 cores. Okay, well they're going to go ahead and say it then. It's cool and quiet, up to 140W CPU support. Here we go. PCIe 2.0 16x, so add up to dual 16x or 1688. So that means you've got full support for 3-way graphics technologies using PCIe 8x native bandwidth for all three, which means you're not going to see any performance degradation. Supports 3-way Nvidia SLI and Crossfire X technology. We've got support for 6 SATA 3, 6 gigabit per second ports, as well as an additional ASMedia controller, giving us an external SATA 6 gigabit per second. So the eSATA on this port is actually SATA 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. Okay, 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 ASMedia USB 3 controller giving us 4 at the back and 2 at the mid board. Okay, 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 it supports Crossfire X and SLI. It's got ROG Connect, which means you can plug into an external computer and you can control the settings of the board itself. It has Extreme Engine Digi Plus, 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-Fi 2. Okay and that pretty much does it. Oh, it includes Demon Tools. Interesting. I like Demon Tools. Wouldn't mind a free copy of that with my motherboard. Okay, let's open this baby up and see what we got for accessories. So we have SATA 3 6 gigabit per second cables that they are all straight to right angle. So all right angle cables. Crossfire Bridge, SLI Bridge. This still amuses me that there's SLI compatibility on this board. We have two connectors, so that is for the front panel headers as well as one of the front USB 2 headers. We got some zip ties included. We got an IO shield with their puffy shiny backing on it. We have a Crossfire 5 Formula Series user guide as well as a Drivers and Utilities DVD. Download the latest from the ASUS 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 got a quick start guide. We have one of those huge ROG stickers that I guess you put on the side of your case. Yeah, I'm not real sold on the ROG sticker. It's all good. We got a three-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 ASUS 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 ever seen. So why don't we start with the CPU socket area. So here you can see we have a black socket and they're calling it AM3B. So this is an AM3 plus socket. It is fully compatible with AM3 plus 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 pieces of plastic that bridge it together. No big deal. It has 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 in its ideal location on the top left edge of the board. And I also have a 4 pin. So it looks like ASUS is allowing you to deliver a tremendous amount of power to the CPU socket, but they have not opted to go with dual 8 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. Okay. 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. All right. 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. All right. So we have six, say the three, six gigabit per second ports that are running off of the AMD controller, which is under this heat sink. 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 two USB 2.0 front panel connectors. We've got an O C button. We have a start and reset switch built in. Love these. They're 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 auxiliary power connector. If you're actually going to load four graphics 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 PCI-E 16X slots. So these are capable of running it up to 16, 8X, 8X for three way SLI or crossfire. You have one PCI-E 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 of them. So there's one, two, three, four up here in the top right corner. Okay. Then there's one, two, three down here along the bottom edge. So that's six, wait, seven so far. And finally one at the back here for your chassis fan. So that's eight four pin PWM fan controllers. Outstanding. All right. Let's have a look at the IO 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. E-SATA that's running SATA three, six gigabit per second. I remind you. Optical audio out, more USB three. The ROG connect, the Intel gigabit LAN and then those look gold plated. We got gold plated 7.1 audio out. So 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 back plate 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 Tips for more unboxings, reviews and other computer videos.