ASUS M4A79T Deluxe should be the best motherboard for Phenom II CPUs at the moment but has it lived up to its older brother reputation and our expectations?

Layout

ASUS M4A79T Deluxe has traditional ASUS layout when it comes to power unit: 10-phase power section from which 2 pairs of MOSFETs are used by 790FX northbridge which gives this model a great overclocking potentials. Warranty period for used components is 57 years and operating temperatures up to 65 degrees Celsius! This is pretty good guarantee that power unit won’t fail in the near or distant future. Cooling solution used for chipset and power unit looks promising and thanks to heatpipes it doesn’t need active elements (fans) which resulted in very quite motherboard. Small problem was noticed with PCI slots layout that are located right below PCIe 16x slots which will make one PCI slot unusable in case you are planning to build CrossFire system. On the other hand you can built CrossFireX system if you are extreme gamer in which case you won’t need PCI slots at all. Overclockers will appreciate decision of ASUS engineers to place Power and Reset button in lower right corner. Sound support is present in form of ALC1200 chip and gigabit LAN by Realtek 8112 NIC. This motherboard support also ASUS Express GATE that allows fast boot of Linux OS and access to Internet, Mail and Skype without any Operating System installed on HDD.

Phenom II X4 955

After we completed our test configuration and inserter our Phenom II X4 955 into socket, which is the newest AMD’s quad-core CPU, we had problems with boot up on standard settings. After restart, BIOS loaded fail-safe settings on 800MHz. After we flashed BIOS with new version, everything worked as a charm. We managed to raise frequency of our Phenom II X4 955 at 3900MHz and nortbridge at 2900MHz. For respectable and detailed performance levels take a look at results section. ASUS M4A79T Deluxe didn’t show any signs of heating up or instability even when we raised voltages and enabled “Red Button”, that is used to raise performance levels to the max and also raises power consumption, but with CPUs made in 45nm manufacturing process that isn’t an issue. BIOS has Precision Tweaker 2 that allows incremental raising of CPU, memory and chipset voltage in small +0.0125 increments. This way it is possible to set ideal amount of voltage for every component and achieve maximum overclock for every day usage.