The ASUS Cross hair II Formula is one of the more attractive moth¬erboards out there. The mix of red copper and a blue coated southbridge heatsink. There's also a lit-up Republic of Gamel'S badge right next to the north¬bridge. Loads of copper pipings run all over the board. There are neat little lit buttons for power¬ing up and also resetting the computer. A lit-up button on the rear of the motheboard allows users to reset the CMOS without having to open up the cabinet and clear CMOS using a jumper or in some extreme caseses, even removing the battery by hand. In comparison to the Cross hair II Formula and the M3N78 PRO, the M3N-HT Deluxe is a tiny bit more crowded. Once again, there are the similar lines of pipe running from up in the motherboard to the southbridge. We talked about how the M3N78 PRO from ASUS was cheaper and a little handicapped as compared to the other high-end end boards from ASUS. A few other things are also missing.

The biggest difference can be seen by simply looking at the board. There are no heatpipes and there is a very basic solution in the form of a heatsink. Everything else about the board is still great. The board has loads of space, three PCl slots but just no SLI. Even the capacitors are cleanly put in small bunches whenever necessary. SATA ports are mount¬ed sideways, so the cables don't intefere with the card. The two boards from Jetway had very similar designs and lay¬out. The two based on the AMD 780G and the 790GX chipsets. The towering heatsinks on the boards aren't of the best quality and they don't seem mounted very well. The SATA ports lie in between the two PCI-E slots so they steer clear of any large cards that you might use on the board.

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The MSI DKA790GX Platinum is a huge board and is absoutely unlike the G43M2 board for Intel processors. The heatsink on the chipset isn't very good though. The fins are delicate and easily break off if you aren't careful while fit¬ting the processor heatsink. The NVIDIA 8200 and 8300¬based motherboards from Biostar, XFX, ZOTAC were all compact Micro ATX boards. The ZOTAC GeForce 8300 especially got very hot when we ran bench¬marks. Overclocking with a chip¬set this hot is pretty unthink¬able. The Biostar GF8200 M2+ had an even smaller heats ink than the Zotac motherboard and abnormally tall capacitors. The XFX GeForce 8200 and 8300 boards too were hot but they had slightly better cooling solutions with the heatpipes.