It seems whatever electronic you might have a need for Asus has a product for you with numerous varities on every chipset, various laptops, and the huge amount of consumer goods they produce. Today we'll be looking a product that's a unique combination of chipsets from AMD. Let's take a look at the Asus M3A79-T Deluxe and see what all it has to offer.

What makes the M3A79-T Deluxe so different is the fact that it marries the Northbridge of the AMD 790FX chipset with the brand new SB750 Southbridge. Until now most boards were still using not only the older SB700 but rather the antiquated SB600 from ATI. The SB700 made it's debut with the 780G integrated graphics chipset and more recently the SB750 with the follow-up the 790GX. For those who don't know the SB750 solves a number of problems with SouthBridge performance all around from the USB bus to SATA. It also adds in full RAID 0/1/5/10 support. The major new feature though is support for AMD's new Advanced Clock Calibration which allows for much higher and more reliable overclocks through AMD's Overdrive and the BIOS. AMD haven't released many details on how it works but suffice to say it does and it extends Phenom overclocking greatly. Combine this with the 790FX Northbridge chipset with Quad PCI-e 16x Crossfire support and you have the ultimate AMD motherboard.

Looking at the rear I/O panel the M3A79-T Deluxe features six USB 2.0 ports, 1 Gigabit port, 8 channel HD audio through coax and optical S/PDIF connections, Firewire support, 1 PS2 Keyboard or Mouse port, and a LAN port. Ususally for a board this high-end there will be two Gigabit ports but it's not a huge loss and it covers everything else. There's room for additonal expansion of USB and Firewire ports with add-on brackets.

Internally the board sports one floppy disk connector, an IDE connector, six SATA ports, four PCI-Express 16x slots, two PCI slots, four DDR2 1066 RAM slots. The board supports HyperTransport 3.0 of course as with other Socket AM2+ motherboards.

Asus M3A32-MVP Deluxe is one of their first Socket AM2+ boards and sports the 790FX with the older SB600 Southbridge. Not only do we do all our performance testing against it but also we wanted to see how similar the boards were. As you can see they are nearly identically physically with a few minor adjustments.

Accessories include two Asus Crossfire bridge cables, IDE cable, floppy adapter, six SATA cables, 2 SATA-to-Molex power adapters, a Q-Shield, multi-function module with 2 USB 2.0 ports and a 1394 port, and the Q-Connector kit.

All of Asus' now standard features are sported here with their AI line for better overclocking and power consumption and ExpressGate which we looked at in depth previously. More information on the AI software can be found here.