Legit Reviews

ASUS M3A79-T Deluxe Motherboard Review

ASUS builds on the success of the M3A78-T by adding a new south bridge to a new board called the M3A79-T Deluxe. How will the new SB750 south bridge and the tried and true 790FX northbridge perform? This motherboard supports AMD Socket AM2+ multi-core processors and with Phenom processors dropping in price this platform is looking solid. Read on to see if the under-the-hood upgrade does anything for performance!

It is nice to finally see the SB750 on the same board as the 790FX chipset. The addition of the SB750 brings a performance boost to the aging 790FX, and boosts the performance of the Asus M3A79-T Deluxe to help it outscore its younger sibling, the Asus M3A78-T. It may not have been a huge jump in performance, but it was enough to make a difference in our testing, and certainly proves that the SB750 fits well with the 790FX. Performance wise, this board did just fantastically.

Article Title: ASUS M3A79-T Deluxe Motherboard Review
Article URL: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/795/1/
Pricing At Time of Print: $188 shipped

Curious what the overclocking difference was between the two boards. I haven't been keeping up with AMD lately but wasn't SB750 supposed to be the cure for AMD's horrid overclocking performance with Phenom?

Now can you slap four 4870x2 cards in this baby and bench it? Can you make 8 way crossfire work? And just how would it run? Could you get it all on one monitor? Or would you be limited to games like Supreme Commander that can make use of dual screens? And what kind of folding could you get done then on that kind of setup? =)

DX wrote:Now can you slap four 4870x2 cards in this baby and bench it? Can you make 8 way crossfire work? And just how would it run? Could you get it all on one monitor? Or would you be limited to games like Supreme Commander that can make use of dual screens? And what kind of folding could you get done then on that kind of setup? =)

You can only pair two of the Radeon HD 4870 X2 cards together as they only have one interconnect. Also the cards are dual-slot, so you couldn't do it anyway. No way to do 8-way CrossFireX!

yet? or ever? still I bet ati could make it work in some way shape or form.

DX wrote:yet? or ever? still I bet ati could make it work in some way shape or form.

For 4870x2s, probably never. I don't think adding anymore GPUs would help, they already have enough trouble scaling from 3 to 4 GPUs, going from 4 to 5 or 6 GPUs would just exacerbate the problem.

but what about the folding power?

ATI cards dont seem to get as many points as Nvidia cards, and you don't need them to be crossfired to fold.

You've still got the clearance (2slot cooler/card) to deal with because of the third slot being a single slot clearance.

DAn

bah I dream I know it isn't like I have 5k just sitting around to toss at something like this to liquid cool the four cards have them paired off so that I have two crossfired pairs so I can push two huge monitors running Supreme Commander. I think that is the only game that will drive two monitors natively full screen.

i am planning to get this M/B with 9850 BE also, since the review not bad
and also combine with ATI 4870 Graphic Card.

Gomeler wrote:Curious what the overclocking difference was between the two boards. I haven't been keeping up with AMD lately but wasn't SB750 supposed to be the cure for AMD's horrid overclocking performance with Phenom?

Overclocking will not be much different if at all. We did not spend much time on it on this review.

Bought this to replace a failed XFX 750a Sli after 3 weeks! I decided I was going to need room for upgrade to a Phenom x4 released in the 3.0+ ghz range anyway, and boy was that extra 80 bucks worth it!! So many connectors, the BIOS was written very very well. Feature packed and utilities galore. The quality vs $ is top notch. Very very happy with it, highly recommend this board. The included disc has very cool utilities and software. I could ramble on for days about the features and usuability. Oh and Express Gate!!! This is one very cool feature, it lets you get to IM, Internet Browser, Skype, and many others before you even load the OS! Now that I have this, 4870's are on the way! (wifey gets an upgrade in graphics, he he)

ASUS M3A79-T Deluxe
Athlon X2 6000+ 3.1 Ghz
4GB OCZ Platinum 1066
2x PNY Verto 9600GT sli
2X 250GB Seagate Barracuda RAID1