 So today I'll be having a look at a motherboard from ASUS. This is the M4A79 XTD 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 their number one reliability is achieved using extreme durable solid capacitors as well as stack cool 3. So stack cool 3 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 790X chipset board, which means we've got support for Crossfire up to Quad Crossfire X. We have support for Phenom 2 X3 and Phenom 2 X4. Also with a BIOS update, you have full support for AMD's latest Phenom 2 X6 processors. It features Express Gate, which is an instant on feature that enables you to access games, productivity, and internet. 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. Okay, moving around to the back of the box, we've got a whole big old list of stuff that it does. So DDR3 1800 with overclocking, 8 plus 2 phase power. We've got a whole lot of other stuff here, 8 channel audio, stylish heat sink. I'll just call that out right on the box, which I agree with, by the way. Turbo key, anti-surge protection, that's kind of neat. Okay, 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 could read that. Oh, that's not so bad, there we go. Okay, so 6 plus 2 phase power, breakthrough power design to fully unleash CPU potential. Okay, then we have EPU, which is system level energy efficiency. So that's an actual chip on the motherboard that takes care of making sure that your system is staying as efficient as possible. And then Turbo V, easy real-time overclocking tuning. Tunings, well, whatever. They were close. Okay, so let's open up this box and have a look at what we find inside. First thing I find is the Q connector, 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. Okay, so user guide, which contains a drivers and utilities DVD. Don't use that, download the latest off the ASUS website. I'm starting to sound like a broken record saying that. Maybe I'll stop. No, I won't. Okay, so in here, this is all English, contains information about ASUS's software, QFAN, 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, ASUS. So we have an I.O. shield. It's not color-coded, just this plain silver one, but it does have their mushy backplate cover. Then we have four SATA2 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, it's black, matches. Alright, let's get the motherboard out of the box. And the first thing I notice about it is definitely the stylish heatsinks. That is for sure. Now, this is a little bit different than the heatsinks that I've seen on any of the ASUS motherboards that I have previously unboxed. And it's not quite their Fortress of Solitude style, nor is it their new sort of more angular style that you see on the Republic of Gamers boards. But this is more like a wavy design, so I don't know how well you can see that. There you go. And so the North Bridge is quite similar, and 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. I like to see a black PCB. That always sort of makes a build look more sharp. Very nice. Alright, so let's start with the basic features. You've got an AM3 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 going to like stand here in front of the camera. It's a little bit easier on my positioning. Okay, so there's nothing else really all that interesting up on the top. This does not feature the Memo-K 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, a multitude of SATA ports. So... Okay, these four are going to be running off of the chipset, and then these three are going to be running off of somewhere else. Unless there are six running off of the chipset, you know what? I'm not going to guess. We're going to have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven SATA 2 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 ASUS 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 an ASUS board. Very odd. Normally ASUS puts it right here, and it's sort of always there. Here we've got the chassis intrusion detection as well as an overvolt CPU jumper. 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 going to 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 COM header. Okay, that's pretty nice. Then we move around to the back of the board where we find the I.O. for the back panel. Two 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 M4A79XTD EVO.