 Yes, many requests for this one many many requests. This is the crosshair for Extreme and it contains all of the latest technologies in fact some that have been around for a while, but just took well a Lot of months to actually be implemented on anything this has the hydrologics engine by lucid So what that means is that you have support for? for not only a TI crossfire X, but also Multi GPU support for mix and match here up here, so cross links three technology mix and match Vendors and cards and whatever else you could possibly want to mix and match for graphics cards so experience true graphics freedom You can run to radion cards you can run to g-force card you can run a g-force and a radion You can run mismatch g-force cards or match g-force cards. It doesn't matter It's not an SLI ready motherboard. Please note the absence of an SLI logo This is an AMD board with an AMD 890 FX chipset But you can still run 2g force cards thanks to the hydrologics chipset right there from lucid, okay? It's a republic of gamers board So you've got ROG connect so you can plug in another computer And you can make any changes to the system settings that you could want to it has USB bios flash back That would be really nice actually that's a cool feature So you just throw a USB with the bios on it you plug it into the back and you boot up and it restores it Very cool. You've got Hey, I believe that one is so that you can use Bluetooth to overclock through your phone or something like that So that's a pretty neat feature if you're into that and 3d mark vented advanced edition is included Let's have a look at the back of the box and see what they have to say It's all of the exact same stuff wow okay five PCIe 16x slots Now we're gonna have to have a look at the manual for a change I know I don't think I've ever actually shown you the manual for a motherboard during an unboxing But we're gonna have to do that to find out exactly how the hydrologics engine splits up those PCI Express lanes because it actually acts as as an intermediary between the chipset and the graphics cards And that's how it performs its magic where it takes two mismatched cards and and takes the performance of them and adds them together It makes more performance, so let's have a look at the accessories first we have What on earth is this we'll be back in a moment This is a Bluetooth riser card. I got it figured out. We have a USB cable for ROG connect We've got an IO shield which is black and looks cool. We have some temperature probes very nice We have some cable ties we have a Q connectors We have a crossfire bridge We have voltage readout Little plugs and you plug those into the board And then you plug your multimeter into there, and you can read the voltages of a bunch of various Aspects of the board we have a firewire USB IO PCI backplate we have one two Three bags of two so that's a total of six SATA 3 cables, and then we have two SATA 2 cables Please note those cables are identical other than the color We have a crosshair 4 extreme motherboard DVD which you should throw away and Download the latest from the Asus website, and we have labels for your SATA cables as well as the manual so give me a moment I'm going to look this up, and I'll be as you can see this is a very complicated chart and Hold on cameraman. Don't move the camera Look at this paragraph so that if people want to they can freeze the video and read it don't move don't move don't zoom Steady hands steady hands cameraman there you go okay? So basically what happens is if you want to run crossfire just native crossfire you use PCIe slots one and three Okay, if you want to run lucid hydra, okay, so that's ATI Nvidia or X which is mixed Multi GPU mode then you can use any one of these combinations here crossfire X will also work with these With these combinations, but if you want to run it natively It's here depending where you want to install your theoretical raid card or other PCIe peripheral you can get varying Widths for the PCIe lanes, so you can get up to 16x 16x 16x For a triple VGA mode and then if you want to run crowd VGA you'll have to settle for 16 16 8 and 8 So there you have it. Let's keep going with this unboxing And we'll have a look at the board itself That is really like Yeah, I don't know it throws a lot of it looks like it probably threw a lot of complications into the engineering process I mean when you're figuring out how to How to optimize you know which ones are running off the bridge chip and which ones are running natively off the chip set and like all this stuff, so a Miracle they managed to make a board like this at all actually And a high-end one no less look at that okay, so that is a very very nice looking board So why don't we start with the general layout the first thing we're gonna find on this board is a CPU socket That's an AM3 socket compatible with the latest quad core and six core CPUs from AMD Up here in the top left you will find an 8-pin CPU power connector as well as a very elaborate looking PWM and chip set cooling solution, so you can see there's a heat pipe actually I'm gonna get you to get a slightly different angle on this first of all there's fins down here And then there's thicker fins up here. Okay, so you can see the heat pipe is running All the way through here down this way Under here over here, and then down to the south bridge and that is actually where the hydrologics chip resides if I Recall correctly let me have a look. I believe it is oh it could also be here Hmm This could be trouble well not sure exactly where it is my guess would be here though Okay, and you can actually see there is a cooling fan inside here as well, and it is plugged in right there, so that is Probably one of the most complicated cooling solutions I've seen on an Asus board in a very long time because it is an AM3 socket board You've got support for dual channel DDR3 memory up to 16 gigs. You've got on board Hey look at that core unlocker button that makes it easy doesn't it then you've got start reset as Well as switches for all the PCI Express slots You know what this can be a lifesaver if you have water cooling if you're using full cover blocks It's almost impossible to remove one card and not another one so if you're trying to Try to troubleshoot like a dead card or anything like that this can like seriously it's worth its weight in gold You've got probit Which is where you can find out the voltages from a bunch of different aspects of the board so you've got a ground here You've got CPU PLL CPU RAM Northbridge Yeah a bunch of other stuff too that's great you got a go button. I believe that's actually the memo K button Okay, and then we've got our 24 pin power along the right hand edge of the board exactly where it belongs Then we have SATA and they're specifically labeling these as optical drive I guess that's because they're SATA too because the other six ports are actually SATA three six gigabit per second ports All right, let's keep going down You can see we've got dual bios chips here as well as a CMOS clear button Then we have our front panel connectors a couple of Hmm A couple of USB headers presumably okay, so nine ten seven eight Okay, and then I'm not sure what the others are Yeah, that's fine all four pin fan connectors on this particular board And there are quite a few of them and then we've got a couple of auxiliary molex connectors So there's one here one up here over by that chip set so that means if you're loading this up with five GPUs I mean remember this this plug here was not designed to provide That much power through the slots on the motherboard so as soon as gone ahead and augmented it with a couple of additional molex Plugs now if you're only running one or two cards It's probably fine not to plug these in but if you are loading it up with five high power cards Definitely plug those into your power supply Let's go around and have a look at the back of the board on the high-o panel So we have a ps2 port which I personally still like to see just because sometimes USB keyboards can be a little bit Finicky when you're running an unstable overclock we've got one two three four five six USB 2.0 ports a CMOS clear Optical audio out that looks like a powered eSATA port as well as a regular eSATA port We have two USB 3.0 ports gigabit Ethernet ROG connect and 7.1 analog audio out thank you. Oh no no not. Thank you. Thank you. I mean. Thank you, but also Check this out, so we got our one two three these are our normal ATX mounting holes, but wait There's more this is not an e ATX board But because I need to e ATX board would probably be about here And it would have one more screw hole, but it is actually wider than an ATX board so bear that in mind If your case is not a little bit wider, it's not going to fit this motherboard Thank you for checking out this unboxing and first look and don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more cool stuff like this The Lucid chip is here camera man, and I work together. This is the South Bridge This is the lucid hydrologics chip, and this is the North Bridge. Thank you for watching