Nvidia chipsets haven't been quite as popular these days as AMD chipsets since they bought ATI and also the success ATI has had with the quality of their integrated video parts. Also on the Intel side Intel basically has an exclusive license them selves to Core i7 CPUs. That said while Nvidia hasn't done any major revisions since the 750a and 780a chipsets there are still new motherboards being built around those chipsets. Today we'll be taking a look at one of these from Asus, the M4N72-E.

The Asus M4N72-E is based off of Nvidia's 750a chipset and is a Socket AM2+ motherboard but is built with support for the new Phenom II Socket AM3 processors as they are backwards compatible. The reverse is not true, you can't use a Socket AM2+ processor in a Socket AM3 motherboard so in a way Socket AM2+ is the most backwards compatible despite being an older interface.

Nvidia released the 780a chipset about a year ago but the price was a little too much for the price range you want in an AMD motherboard these days, and even with Phenom II being a much more powerful processor it's hard to drop as much on the motherboard as you are for a high-end processor. 750a is the mid-range fix for this with the main loss being only going to 19 PCI-Express 2.0 lanes allowing for 2-way SLI, not 3-way. Since even running SLI is not that common and especially 3 is incredibly rare thing to do and something where price/benefit starts to lose it's luster we don't think this is too much of a loss.

Unique features from Asus for the M4N72-E include support for DDR2 memory overclocked to 1.3GHz for higher bandwidth, an 8+1 phase power design for better overclocking and lower power consumption, and anti-surge protection. Asus also includes a lot of software with their motherboards to enable advanced features. This includes TurboV which allows for easier overclocking, TurboKey which allows the user to overclock with the push of a button, ExpressGate which is a tiny Linux distribution that ships with the motherboard that features a web browser, music player, Skype, and instant messaging capabilities, Q-Connector to allow for quick connection from the case front panel connectors to the motherboard, Q-Shield which removes the annoying metal tabs on the I/O shield with something that works instantly and is slightly padded.

BIOS features include O.C. profile which saves a user's custom BIOS, CrashFree Bios 2 which allows the user to recover a damaged BIOS, EZFlash 2 which allows for easy flashing from within the BIOS and MyLogo2 for a personal image for the boot screen rather than the standard Asus logo.

The M4N72-E has a good layout overall. There are two heatsinks one which covers the CPU and another which covers the chipsets in between the ports and the processor. The motherboard uses 4-pin CPU power, features two 16x PCI-Express slots which supports SLI, two additional PCI-E 1x slots, two PCI slots, 4 DDR2 DIMM sots on the rear next to the 24-pin ATX power, six SATA 2.0 ports, all next to one IDE connector. No floppy adapter on this board.

A close up shot of the two PCI-E 16x expansion slots, the one downside to ATI's dominance lately in the AMD chipset world is that there haven't been too many new motherboards with SLI support if you want to go that route and Nvidia's cards have been picking up in strength at least with the higher-end graphics market.

Here we see the IDE connector, SATA ports, and USB and Firewire front panel connectors.

4 DDR2 slots are featured, the Socket AM2+ socket, 24-pin ATX motherboard power, and 6 SATA ports.

The I/O devices on the back include six USB 2.0 ports, a PS/2 mouse and keyboard port, Firewire, Gigabit Ethernet, and 7.1 HD Realtek audio. One thing missing is the integrated video that comes with some 750a chipset based motherboards so keep that in mind if you're looking at this board: there is no onboard video output.

The bundle is fairly standard, I/O, SATA cables, case sticker, IDE and floppy cable, Asus Quick-Connectors, SLI adapter, and manual.