I think we can all sit back and say Asus knows how to make a nice motherboard. Not only does this board overclock well but it looks good and is rock solid for anything I through at it. The competition is steep though. Gigabyte has their 790FXT, MSI has their GD-70, DFI has their 790FXB, and Asus has the top Crosshair III ROG board. Pretty much everybody board is sitting in the same bowl where features and performance is concernd so the real question is price. Every single one of these top end boards are under $200 currently on Newegg which in my opinion has Intel beat. With the product in question though, Asus has the M4A79T priced above the other companies enthusiast boards. Is it really worth the extra 10-20 bucks? I say yes, you can't beat exceptional quality from a good company.

The MA785GMT-UD2H motherboard has a lot going for it. It is relatively inexpensive at 89.99 on Newegg as of this morning. For that price you get the full package including the best featured integrated graphics on the market, High Definition Audio in the form of the Realtek ALC889A CODEC, low noise with no fans on the NB, and a decent performer to boot. HTPC owners will love the fact that the integrated video and sound can play back full lossless Blu-ray with ease and do it without a noisy, hot external video card. Performance is exactly in line with the previous motherboard I tested with this chipset, with only small performance differences typical of two different benchmark runs. The board overclocked pretty well almost hitting 20% stable overclock with no voltage modification, which is pretty good.

Next in line are the M4A785TD-M EVO and M4A785TD-V EVO, both pretty much the same except for the fact that the first one is a microATX and the second one is an ATX motherboard, so you can expect the latter one to have additional PCI-Express x16 slot that works in x4 mode, one more PCI-Express x1 and one more PCI slot. Both of these will have the 128MB DDR3 1333 SidePort memory and both feature 8+2-phase power design so that 140W CPUs are supported. In addition to the usual ports, these two will also have a FireWire port as well.

The MSI 785GT-E63, or the bigger one, has five SATA ports and one powered eSATA port, additional three PCI slots, Gigabit LAN, 7.1-channel HD audio, and DVI, HDMI and D-Sub outputs. The smaller one, MSI 785GTM-E45, which should be cheaper, lacks eSATA and two PCI slots. Unfortunately, as these are meant for the value part of the market, both boards lack SidePort memory.

The full ATX 785G-E65, and microATX 785GM-E65 and 785GM-E51 all feature MSI's Active Phase Switching, Easy OC for non-BIOS overclocking and all three support AMD's AM3 processors. All three also have support for DDR3 memory with four memory slots, although only the full ATX 785G-E65 supports DDR3-1600 and microATX are limited to DDR3-1333.