An expensive board from Asus, but do you get your money’s worth from the M4A79T?
While it isn't every day we get a new piece of tech, it still happens pretty darn often around here, and the most interesting ones will get photographed before we've even benched them - just bash that URL in above to see what we do. This board from ASUS qualified pretty well, being its version of an AM3 enthusiast mobo. It looks cool, but does it meet the mark of the relatively high price tag?
Based around the ubiquitous 790FX chipset, this board has four PCIe 16x slots that will run at 8x electrical when three or more cards are used. It's also got two PCI slots for soundcards or TV tuners, though any of the 16x slots can work as a 1x/4x slot if you run out of room. All this tech is plugged into a dark brown PCB that makes it look like a giant (albeit very flat) chocolate bar, with strong colours used that should look quite nice in a windowed case.
The chipset cooling array looks particularly impressive, a warm copper arrangement consisting of a tall heatsink for the power regulation, a wide heatsink with an 'X' shape on it for the Northbridge, and a shorter square for the Southbridge. They're all connected with heatpipes to promote better heat transfer, but that still didn't prevent the board from getting a little warm without airflow.
There's ten ferrite chokes lined up next to matching solid caps just west of the CPU socket, and only solid caps are used all over the board. The AM3 socket also has enough clearance for standard-height memory in the two closer orange slots when using an aftermarket heatsink. All four DDR3 slots support dual-channel, simply by matching identical sticks in identical colours.
Power connections are good for the board too, as the 8- and 24-pin connectors are placed well (the 8-pin is especially accessible). Storage is no slouch, with a right-angled IDE socket and five SATA ports - though only two of these are right-angled. For such an expensive board, we'd have liked to see at least six right-angled ports here.
Power and reset buttons are included next to the front panel headers, and are right next to the USB headers. A floppy socket and audio header round out the important connections along the bottom.
The I/O panel at the back of the mobo is a decent enough offering, with two PS/2, six USB, Firewire, eSATA, Optical/Coaxial, Ethernet and 7.1 channel audio (provided by a Realtek ALC1200 sound chip). Also onboard are some flash chips with ASUS' ExpressGate onboard, though this OS is limited in its usefulness.
Getting into the meat and potatoes of the board, we gave it our Phenom II X810 chip and pushed it until it wouldn't boot, then pushed it a little more. We hit a max HT speed of 280MHz (giving a result of 4247 in Cinebench 1x), but we were strangely limited in the voltage stakes by the BIOS - 1.45V was the maximum Vcore we could use. We're half convinced that this measure is to protect the CPU from people who aren't really sure what they're doing, but even turning on the 'Extreme Overvoltage' setting for the CPU wouldn't let us increase it more.
The highest clock we've hit on an AM3 board is 289, so it's not too far off.
Issue: 106 | November, 2009