Thread: Asus M4A79T Deluxe Motherboard

With Socket AM3 processors supporting DDR3 memory, motherboard manufacturers are finally starting to shift the focus from DDR2 to DDR3 memory based boards. Asus too is focusing largely on AMD's socket AM3 processors, confirming their interest with the release of the M4A79T-Deluxe motherboard. The M4A79T-Deluxe motherboard chipset is based on the AMD 790FX. northbridge.

Unlike the previous M4A79 motherboards which featured the similar chipset, this motherboard is not backward compatible with older Socket AM2+ processors.

Features and Build Quality
Aimed especially towards high-end rigs, the board screams high-performance, sporting multi-GPU support for ATI CrossFireX, Triple CrossFireX and Quad CrossFireX. It runs in x16 mode when a single card is installed and can support CrossFire in dual x16, three-way and quad modes. The motherboard supports a total of 16 GB DDR3-1600 MHz RAM. It has an 8+2 phase power design which ensures accurate and clean power supplied to the processor and better power efficiency. The all-solid capacitors ensure a longer life and the copper heat pipes along with the heatsink provide adequate cooling. The back I/O panel flaunts feature-rich connectivity, with six USB ports, one eSATA port, one FireWire port, Gigabit Ethernet, an 8-channel audio solution and legacy PS2 ports for input devices.



The board features Asus Stack cool-a noiseless (fan-less) solution which ensures lower temperatures by incorporating a specially designed PCB to dissipate heat from critical components. The Asus Anti-Surge Protection feature protects the motherboard from damage caused by surges from the PSU. A bundled software-TurboV, provides realtime overclocking possibilities without restarting the system.

The overall layout of the motherboard is good with evenly placed I/O connectors, but the PCI slots and the SATA ports are cramped. Three of the five SATA ports and one of the two PCI slots are blocked if dual CrossFireX mode or Dual-slot GPUs are used.

This promising performer was tested using AMD's Phenom II X4 810 processor running at 2.8 GHz along with 4 GB DDR3-1066 MHz RAM, a 500 GB hard drive and the Zotac GTX280 graphics card. The board performed well in different areas such as file compression, audio/video encoding and gaming environments. The final output scores can be seen in the table alongside.