ASUS M4A79T Deluxe Motherboard Review

[Apoptosis]

ASUS M4A79T Deluxe Motherboard Review

We showed you a preview of the ASUS M4A79T Deluxe socket AM3 motherboard last month and today we will show you how it benchmarks against a socket AM2+ motherboard. Read on to find out if DDR3 memory helps boost performance over a board running DDR2 memory and if 8GB of DDR3 memory is stable on the board. If that isn't enough we also overclock the CPU over 1.2GHz!

Using the same ASUS Triton 81 CPU Cooler that I used on the MSI DKA790GX Platinum motherboard the ASUS M4A79T Deluxe motherboard reached an HT clock frequency of 294MHz, which is 1MHz shy of our previous best for this specific processor. This put the final clock frequency at 3.82GHz, which is an overclock of 1,222MHz. The ASUS M4A79T Deluxe was also able to run 8GB of Corsair DOMINATOR DDR3 memory at 1333MHz with CL9 timings like a champ. Even increasing the memory frequency up to 1600MHz the board would still run four 2GB DDR3 modules with no stability issues, which is a good sign that the BIOS is already pretty solid on this motherboard.

Article Title: ASUS M4A79T Deluxe Motherboard Review
Article URL: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/902/1/

[gwolfman]

Thanks for the review and the little video blurbs are nice.

[Gomeler]

Just a note, with some AM2+ and AM3 boards, CPU-Z isn't able to read the vCORE but rather simply reports the CPU VID. Hence why you often see the Phenom II results knocking on 6GHz with only "1.5 vcore".

It's a damn shame SLI and CrossFire aren't universal on the AM3 platform like on the LGA1366 platform. That board would kick ass with two GTX295s and an LN2 pot on the CPU

[Major_A]

I'm not overly concerned but I do have a question. With regards to page 6, the Everest benchmarks. In the description the RAM is running unganged. With my Phenom X3 setup I chose to run the memory ganged in the BIOS.



Can you please tell me in layman's terms what ganged and unganged means? I looked it up after I bought this setup and to the best of my knowledge it just means that the RAM is running in Dual Channel. Is this correct?

[Apoptosis]

Ganged memory mode is when all 128 bits of the system memory interface behave as a single large memory channel. This was the case in the previous K8 architecture.

Unganged memory mode is a newer feature supported by Phenom and Phenom II processors that splits the 128 bit memory interface into two independent 64 bit memory channels. Ganged mode will yield some slightly higher bandwidth numbers when running some *single* threaded applications or benchmarks, but unganged mode is better for *multi* threaded applications. Since this was a review using a quad-core Phenom II processor I went with the default unganged setting since all of the benchmarks were multi threaded.

Here is what I'm working on right now with the ASUS M4A79T:

[Major_A]

Nice! Thank you for explaining the ganged vs unganged to me. So do you recommend for everyday usage to run it unganged?

[Gomeler]

Nice! Thank you for explaining the ganged vs unganged to me. So do you recommend for everyday usage to run it unganged?

Run unganged. I haven't tested many applications yet but in theory running unganged should remove any bottlenecks as from my understanding the CPU can then read and write from different memory modules/ranks at the same time. You don't get as much bandwidth when it's doing concurrent read/writes but at the same time the CPU doesn't have to wait as much to do a write if a read is occurring and vice versa.

Like Nathan said, most if not all applications are becoming multi-threaded and as such you'll have many threads hitting the memory at the same time. You might as well make it as easy as possible for them to access the memory to remove that as a bottleneck.

Here is what I'm working on right now with the ASUS M4A79T:

Looking forward to seeing what you can pull from that board. Maybe we can have a bench-off, Gigabyte versus Asus, and limit it to dry ice

[Major_A]

Sounds good, thank you Gomeler.

[Apoptosis]

With the applications that I run it only makes since to run unganged, so that is what I leave mine on at all times.

[FeRaL]

Great review Nathan. This really makes me think twice about going with DDR3. But like you said, it can only get better from here.

[Major_A]

Out of curiosity I re-ran the benchmark unganged and here are the resutls.

[ColdPlay]

Thanks for a nice review and sight!
I recently ordered this "candywork" :

AMD Phenom II X4 940 Black Edition
125W, AM2+/AM3, 8MB Cache, 3,0Ghz, Boxed
Asus M4A79T Deluxe, Socket-AM3
AMD 790FX+SB750, DDR3, Firewire, GbLAN, ATX, 4xPCI
Kingston DDR3 HyperX 1600MHz 6GB,
Kit w/3X HyperX 2GB DDR3, CL8-8-8-24
BenQ 22" LCD M2200HD
1920x1080, 10000:1, 2ms, VGA/DVI/HDMI
Akasa infinti ZOR Gaming Case

I think the motherboard seems great, and I'll be prepared for the future with the am3 socket.
I've noticed though, I've bought ddr3 1600mhz and the board supports only 1333mhz o.c. to 1600mhz.
Am I in big trouble, or can I overclock the motherboard acheaving support for my Kingston Hyper Pack???
My dealer is komplett.no , and they confirmed when I asked, that the harwarez were compatible. Were they wrong?

Thanks for any advise!
Cold

[Apoptosis]

you'll have to 'oc' to reach 1600MHz, but it works just fine!

Welcome to the site.

[ColdPlay]

Thanks, I'm planning to overclock the rig.
What would you recomend in cooling, and is there a basic step by step worktrough on overclocking?
I mean for noobs like me
I've been checking out bios'es, but I really now very little on the subject!