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Asus readying eight AM3 motherboards

by on12 January 2009

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Five with AMD chipset, three with Nvidia

Asus has unveiled its lists of AM3 motherboards and it holds a couple of surprises with the first one being a model based on a new Nvidia chipset. The board in question is the M4N82 Deluxe which Asus is listing as being based on the Nvidia nForce 980a SLI chipset, a model which is new to us.

This is as yet an unannounced chipset from Nvidia and we don't have a lot of details with regards to what's on offer apart from the meagre spec's that Asus supply. This is yet another Hybrid SLI chipset, although it supports 3-Way SLI thanks to three x16 PCIe slots, although it's unknown if this chipset supports the full bandwidth for all three slots or not. Apart from this the M4N82 Deluxe has five SATA ports, one eSATA, Gigabit Ethernet, FireWire and 7.1-channel audio support.

The other two Nvidia models are the M4N72-E which is based on the current nForce 750a chipset and the M4N78 PRO which is based on the Geforce 8300 chipset. Neither offer anything out of the ordinary in terms of features.

The list of boards based on AMD chipsets is somewhat longer, as it consists of the M4A79T Deluxe, the M4A79 Deluxe, the M4A78T-E, the M4A78-E and finally the M4A78 PRO. The first two are based on the 790FX chipset in a combination with the upcoming SB750, while the next two boards use the 790GX chipset, again combined with the SB750 and the last board is based on the 780G chipset combined with the current SB700.

Both the M4A79T Deluxe and the M4A79 Deluxe has four x16 PCIe slots, although if you'd use all the four slots at once, they'd be limited to x8 bandwidth. The M4A78T-E and the M4A78-E both have a pair of x16 PCIe slots, again limited to x8 bandwidth if both are being used at the same time.

The kicker here is that the both T models, i.e. the M4A79T Deluxe and the M4A78T-E both support DDR3 memory and as far as we know, these are the first announced AM3 motherboards with DDR3 support. It seems like AMD has limited itself to DDR3 1333MHz, although Asus lists support for DDR3 1600MHz via overclocking.

All of the boards have 8-phase power regulation with an additional one to two power phases for the memory and HyperTransport controllers which are part of the CPU core.

You can find the press relase and a picture of the M4A79T Deluxe here
Last modified on 12 January 2009
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