On the next few pages we'll show you some photos. The images were taken at high-resolution and then cropped and scaled down. The camera used was a Canon 450D 12 MegaPixel.

Alright, let's take a look at the product. Here we have the entire bundle. The product is to be positioned in the sub-125 USD market. Next to the motherboard you'll receive the back plate, driver CD, a SATA cables and a Parallel ATA (IDE) cable. And a little terminator PCIe card (we'll show you that later).

As you can see this is ATX motherboard with integrated Radeon series 4 graphics. We also spot two x16 PCIe slots for CrossfireX graphics though when used simultaneously your PCIe lane configuration will be split up as 8x:8x. There's also a x1 PCie, a x4 slot and two traditional PCI slots.  That's very nice connectivity. Oh and the overall looks are very nice in a black blue color scheme.

So here we have the back panel I/O connectivity. We spot a PS2 mouse connector, one D-Sub (VGA), DVI and HDMI connector (great connectivity!). We see (and I love this) an optical TOSLINK sound output, a total of 4x USB 2.0 ports and then 2x USB 3.0 (blue ones), 1x eSATA (6G), Firewire, one Gigabit Ethernet LAN connector and then the 8.1 channels of analog audio as well.

The embedded Radeon HD 4290 on the Northbridge is HDMI 1.3 compliant, so it also supports higher bandwidth and greater color depth for future video standards. The onboard audio for the ASUS M4A89 GTD motherboard is provided by a Realtek ALC892 CODEC. This is a fully High Definition Audio 1.0 compliant CODEC that supports ten DAC channels that can split into 8 Channel Front Panel Audio simultaneous output.

When we flip the board 90 degrees counter clockwise we look at socket AM3, and also see quality Japanese capacitors and good Ferrite core chokes hidden under the massive passive cooler. There's an 8-pin CPU fan header positioned really well. We like the 8-pin CPU [power header. When overclocking the processor we can easily draw much more current. So that little extra is certainly nice.