As DDR3 pricing continues to plummet, the new AMD AM3 platform becomes more and more viable. Now with 4GB dual-channel kits priced as low as $55 US, they cost just $15 US more than the equivalent DDR2 kits. Although we have seen no real performance gains when coming from DDR2-1066 to DDR3-1333 on the AM3 platform, the small difference in price does warrant the upgrade to AMD’s latest platform.

Still, those looking to jump on the AM3 boat will not be doing so to save a buck, and therefore we believe that this platform is reserved for high-end Phenom II X4 systems. AM3 motherboards are still thin on the ground, with just a handful in existence. Clearly most motherboard manufacturers feel that for now users will continue to go after AM2+ boards, and after all, they still support the mighty Phenom II X4 955.

Not so long ago we did review the ECS A790GXM-AD3, which is an AM3 motherboard, though with a budget orientated design we were a little confused by this product. Priced at just $110 US this ECS motherboard was cheap, but with an average feature set and poor overclocking, it did not exactly fit the profile of what we feel an AM3 motherboard should be.

Therefore we are going to revisit the AM3 platform once again, but this time with a more appropriate product, being the M4A79T Deluxe by ASUS. Priced at $190 US, this is one of the most expensive AMD motherboards available and while this is not necessarily a positive thing, the M4A79T Deluxe does well in justifying the price tag.

Although the competition is few and far between, the ASUS M4A79T Deluxe stacks up well against its competitors. When reviewing this motherboard we will be focusing on its features and overclocking performance. Of course we will be pairing the M4A79T Deluxe with none other than AMD’s flagship processor, the Phenom II X4 955. Clocked at a healthy 3.20GHz, we are keen to see how much further the M4A79T Deluxe can push this processor.

Despite being quite old now, the AMD 790FX chipset still holds its own, and with the updated SB750 south bridge chip it is up there with the best of the best. Board features include quad PCI Express 2.0 x16 ports (CrossFireX), twelve USB 2.0 ports, Firewire, SATA RAID, eSATA (SATA on the Go), 8-channel HD Audio and Express Gate.

The M4A79T Deluxe features four DDR3 memory DIMM slots, with official support for 1600/1333/1066 memory (non-ECC, un-buffered), though DDR2-1600 memory support can only be achieved through overclocking. ASUS claims that the board can support up to 16GB of memory, for which you would need four 4GB memory modules.

The board also features four PCI Express x16 slots, providing the M4A79T Deluxe with impressive multi-GPU capabilities. However please note that if all four slots are populated the effective bandwidth of each slot will be reduced from 16x to 8x. When using three graphics cards the configuration will change to 16x/8x/8x, and finally with just two graphics cards the full 16x/16x bandwidth will become available.

The High Definition Audio is supported by the Realtek ALC1200 HD Audio codec, featuring optical S/PDIF support via the I/O panel. The Realtek ALC1200 audio codec has been heavily used by ASUS in the past, and we are quite accustomed to finding it on their more high-end motherboards.

ASUS has gone with a single Realtek 8112 Gigabit Ethernet controller which uses the PCI Express bus for maximum throughput. There is no wireless LAN support included on the M4A79T Deluxe, so users will have to look to include this feature using an expansion card.

Although wireless LAN may not exist, Firewire certainly does, thanks to the inclusion of the VIA VT6315N controller supporting two IEEE 1394a ports, one of which is located on the I/O panel. Additionally there are also six USB 2.0 ports found on the I/O panel, with the rest connecting via the motherboards onboard headers.

As mentioned previously, the SB750 south bridge chip improves upon storage, offering support for six SATA devices. Furthermore, support for SATA RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID5, RAID 10, and JBOD is also included, providing users with a great deal of flexibility. There is also a single IDE port, which provides support for two ATA-133/100/66/33 devices.

The unique ASUS “Express Gate” is also included on the M4A79T Deluxe and this feature makes it possible to surf the Internet after a 5-second-bootup time without entering Windows. Using an embedded Linux environment it allows users to enjoy instant access to commonly used functions like accessing the Internet, VoIP, and Web emailing without entering the OS.

ASUS Express Gate is powered by the Splashtop instant-on Linux desktop environment by DeviceVM, which will offer a way to surf the web with Firefox or make VoIP phone calls through Skype within five seconds of pushing the PC’s start button, and without fully booting the computer. Splashtop is also able to access and use the built-in 802.11n wireless adapter right out of the box.

The north bridge chip is cooled by a rather large heatsink, measuring 7cm long and 3.5cm at the tallest point. This large heatsink is connected to a much smaller compact south bridge heatsink via a single copper heatpipe. The north bridge heatsink also uses an additional copper heatpipe to connect with another array of fins located behind the I/O panel.

ASUS has provided the 8-phase PWMs with some passive cooling, which has now become somewhat standard. Speaking of which, ASUS claims that the M4A79T Deluxe features a true 8+2 phase design, which is quite impressive. The additional 2 phase design delivers power to the integrated memory controller and HT bus.

However, it should be noted that this is simply marketing fluff. The ASUS M4A79T Deluxe features an ST L6740L hybrid 4+1 controller. So in order to get what ASUS calls an 8+2 design they use double inductors for each phase, which splits the power load across more components. This should improve the board’s durability and reduce temperatures, but it is not a true 8 phase design as they claim.

The board also offers a number of onboard expansion ports and slots. There are four PCI Express x16 ports in total. As mentioned earlier, the board supports dual 16x/16x, triple 16x/8x/8x and quad 8x/8x/8x/8x multi-GPU configurations. The first three slots are separated by a single PCI slot, while the 3rd and 4th slots are placed right next to one another.

This means for quad CrossFireX support the graphics cards must feature a single slot cooler. However those running the more common dual card setup will be happy to know that the blue PCI Express 16x slots are separated by a total of three expansion slots, providing a great deal of room between the two graphics cards.

Despite featuring four PCI Express 16x slots, the M4A79T Deluxe does extremely well to avoid any conflictions with the DDR3 DIMM slots. Amazingly ASUS has managed to space these components 3.5cm apart, meaning that users can comfortably remove and install memory modules without first having to remove the graphics card.

Unfortunately the design is not without a few faults, and although they are not exactly critical errors they could potentially create a few headaches for some users. First and foremost just two of the five SATA ports are mounted on a 90-degree angle to avoid conflicting with long graphics cards. However because the M4A79T Deluxe does have so many PCIe 16x ports, this will really only be an issue for users with three or more graphics cards.

The other small issue that we had with the M4A79T Deluxe was the crowded CPU socket, which has been placed just 1cm from the first DIMM slot. This proved to be a problem with quite a few after market heatsinks, as they would conflict with the memory modules. The solution was to install the memory modules in the 3rd and 4th DIMM slots rather than the 1st and 2nd. This is of course only a viable solution if you are running just two memory modules.

Moving on, the I/O panel appeared just as crowded as the CPU socket, but this is a good thing as it adds to the board’s connectivity options right out of the box. Featured on the I/O panel are six USB 2.0 ports, one eSATA port, a single Firewire port, six audio jacks, a coaxial and S/PDIF port, along with a Gigabit LAN port and a single PS/2 connector for either a keyboard or mouse. Legacy connections that are absent from the I/O panel include a parallel printer port and two serial ports, none of which we miss in the slightest.

The Ai Tweaker menu does not have any sub-menus, rather everything overclocking related can be found under the one roof. There is a significant amount of tweakable options, and using this menu alone we were able to push our 3.20GHz Phenom II X4 955 processor all the way to 3.70GHz, which is the highest frequency any motherboard has been able to push this processor.

Further down the Ai Tweaker list you will find a serious amount of memory options; so many in fact that it is almost overwhelming. When the DRAM Timing Control option is set to manual, over twenty memory related options become available to the user. The above screen shot shows the majority of these options, and while most users will only adjust the first five, it is nice to have everything available for a little tweaking if needed at some point.

At the bottom of the Ai Tweaker menu there is a large amount of voltage options. There are ten voltage related options available in total, which will really make for some serious fine tuning. Using what ASUS calls Precision Tweaker 2, the M4A79T Deluxe offers 64 micro-adjustment steps (0.02v) for the north bridge, front side bus termination, CPU PLL and DRAM.

Another menu of interest is the CPU menu, found within the Advanced BIOS menu, as well as the Power menu which houses all the hardware monitoring features. While this gives you all those voltage and temperature readouts, it also features the Q-Fan function for automated fan control. The CPU menu basically allows the user to enable or disable certain CPU features.

The Tools menu features the ASUS O.C. Profile which allows users to save sets of different BIOS configurations, this is an invaluable thing to have if you ask me. Then we have Ai Net 2 which we have seen on numerous ASUS boards, and the newest addition to the ASUS line-up called 'Express Gate' which can be enabled or disabled in this menu.

When overclocking our processor in the Ai Tweaker menu we first set the Ai Overclock Tuner option to manual, increased the CPU ratio setting to x18.5, and boosted the vcore voltage to 1.3625v. This kicked the Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition processor frequency from 3.20GHz to 3.70GHz, giving us a nice 16% overclock.

This simple yet impressive overclock can only be applied to AMD “Black Edition” processors, as they feature unlocked clock multipliers. Other AMD processors that have fixed clock multipliers will require the user to increase the FSB (Front Side Bus), so we also tried applying this overclocking method to our Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition processor.

Leaving the multiplier at 15x meant that the FSB needed to be increased to 247MHz, giving us a total clock frequency of 3.70GHz. Again the voltage was increased, while the DDR3 memory frequency was also boosted by default. Now because we were using aggressive DDR3 timings of CAS6-6-6-20 and we wanted to continue using them, the DDR3 memory frequency was backed off towards 1333MHz.

Overall, as we were anticipating, the ASUS M4A79T Deluxe provided us with a rewarding overclocking experience. Getting the most out of our Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition processor was all too easy and when stress testing the overclock we noticed no kind of vdrop that could un-stabilize the system.

Phenom X4 Test System Specs - AMD Phenom X4 II 955 (AM3) - x2 Kingston HyperX 2GB DDR2-1066 (CAS 5-5-5-15) - x2 Kingston HyperX 2GB DDR3-1333 (CAS 7-7-7-20) - ASUS M4A79T Deluxe (AMD 790FX) - ASUS Crosshair III Formula (AMD 790FX) - ECS A790GXM-AD3 (AMD 790GX) - ASUS M3A79-T Deluxe (AMD 790FX) - ASUS M4A78-HTPC (AMD 780G) - OCZ GameXStream (700 watt) - Seagate 500GB 7200-RPM (Serial ATA300) - ASUS GeForce GTX 285 (1GB) Software - Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate SP1 (64-bit) - Nvidia Forceware 182.50

The SATA hard drive and LAN performance of the ASUS M4A79T Deluxe are up to par, matching the performance of other high-end AMD motherboards.

The memory bandwidth performance of the ASUS M4A79T Deluxe was impressive, delivering by far the best DDR3-1333 results that we have seen. When testing with SiSoftware Sandra 2009 the M4A79T Deluxe reached 13GB/s, making the 9GB/s of the ECS A790GXM-AD3 look a little silly.

The ASUS M4A79T Deluxe results when testing with Super PI were amongst the best we have seen from an AMD motherboard. The CINEBENCH R10 performance was also strong, as was the WinRAR performance. Finally the M4A79T Deluxe continued to deliver in the SPECviewperf test.

Although the margins were minimal, due to the gaming being predominantly GPU limited, the ASUS M4A79T Deluxe did display strong gaming performance.

Interestingly, the power consumption levels of the ASUS M4A79T Deluxe are quite low, especially under load. This is an impressive attribute for such a high-end motherboard, as it means consumers can use this board with AMD’s flagship processor and still only see an idle consumption of just 129 watts.

Of course the M4A79T Deluxe is not an Intel motherboard, as it is designed for AMD processors using an AMD chipset. The fact remains that at $190 US this is one of the most expensive AMD motherboards on the market. As an example, DFI are flogging their flagship AM3 (790FX) board for just $140 US, and in many ways this board compares well to the M4A79T Deluxe.

Then the M4A79T Deluxe also has to contend with the fact that there are plenty of cheaper AMD 790FX motherboards designed to use DDR2 memory with the AM2+ socket. Therefore, it is clear that the M4A79T Deluxe is not designed or intended to be used in budget systems. Rather, the M4A79T Deluxe is a no expenses spared motherboard, designed for Phenom II users trying to get the very best performance out of their processor.

While the ASUS M4A79T Deluxe does present Phenom II users with a powerful solution, it also provides them with an upgrade path that will last for years, thanks to the AM3 socket. Although users may pay a slight price premium for DDR3 memory now, they do so knowing that they are investing in a platform that will offer them some kind of upgrade solution in years to come.

When testing the M4A79T Deluxe we found that it offered a vast array of features, many of which we found very useful. There are also a lot of really cool unique features as well, such as the ASUS Express Gate. However, although the board did offer everything we could have asked for, it was still a little lacking in some areas.

For example, the onboard SATA ports were few and far between, with a total of just five ports available. Honestly we felt that five SATA ports was a little dismal, particularly for an ASUS flagship board. When compared to the competition ASUS is seriously lacking in this department. For less money the Gigabyte MA790FXT-UD5P can be picked up and this board features twice as many ports onboard; that’s right, ten SATA ports!

-

-

Reviewed By Steven Walton