Photos - ASUS M4A79 Deluxe(790FX) platform
The ASUS M4A79 Deluxe
Especially when you are planning to tweak and overclock, or are in the market for a motherboard with some features it might be a good thing to look into some of the motherboards available out there.
Obviously you want to go for a 790 FX/GX ( FX = no integrated graphics unit / GX has integrated graphics unit) based motherboard as you'll know for sure it's compatible with Socket AM3 processors and deliver a whole she-bang in features and performance.
For this review we opted to test with the ASUS M4A79 Deluxe. This motherboard is a tweakers extraordinaire motherboard with a wicked feature set, it's what ASUS does really well. As stated, it's a DDR2 platform. Since the motherboard is such an integral and important product to got with the processor, I wanted to swiftly talk you through this The ASUS M4A79 Deluxe.
There are many 790 chipset based motherboards available, our choice was the ASUS M4A79 Deluxe. It's however an expensive motherboard with a pricetag of 199 USD. You'll receive the default bundled items, but a motherboard to drool on. If you seek a little (click here) you can find 790GX motherboards at 125-150 USD already.
Observe the passive design, it's cooling down the AMD 790FX chipset and SB750 Southbridge chip. Also did you notice it already ? Correct, that's a total of 4 PCIe slots, you could go quad-fire with this motherboard or for example use three Radeon cards in Crossfire and pop in a GeForce for PhysX. These PCI Express 2.0 x16 slots operate at dual x16, triple x16 / x8, or quad x8 when it comes to link speeds.
Obviously we spot Socket AM2+ (940 pins). The Socket AM3 CPUs use 938 pins and thus are are pin-compatible with AM2+ sockets. This board features an extra 2 phase power dedicated to integrated memory/HT controller, so count along with me .. you'll spot 10 ferrite core chokes with the already new 8-phase VRM power design.
There's a design flaw I spotted though, installing a double slot graphics card in the second PCI Express slot blocks three of the five SATA (colored red) connectors, I sometimes wonder why manufacturers do not think deeply enough about stuff like that.
