ASUS M4A79 Deluxe ATX AMD Motherboard

Comment:
I've been running it two months now and I like this board, it's very stable and performs well. I have yet to overclock so it would be difficult for me to comment on that. 4-card crossfire is pretty wasteful, but I like that I can put any pci-e card in the two extra ones, be they 1x, 2x, 4x, 8x or 16x.I'm planning on doing a Hardware RAID5 for this workstation, so a wide PCI-E will be required. Nice.

Comment:
The ASUS M4A79 Deluxe is a great motherboard as far as I am concerned. With AM3 support along with DDR2 support, it gives people who do not see the point in upgrading to DDR3 yet a very good chance to make a very good system without breaking the bank by getting a set of (HIGHLY) over-rated sets of DDR3 RAM.The M4A79 Deluxe came in a very nice box, just like any motherboard does, and it had nothing wrong with it when I got it. Absolutely nothing got damaged in the shipping, and this has been the case with everything else I have ordered from NCIX (which isn't much, but still). It comes with 2 bride connectors for CrossFireX OR SLI, and therefore has both ATI and Nvidia support. Apart from that the installation of the motherboard is very smooth, and so, there isn't too much to worry about there. Just know what you're doing! This motherboard fits in your standard ATX case.I loved the secondary power button on the motherboard since it can actually be used as the main power button, and you can use the one on your case as a overclocking button! That's right, you can actually use this motherboard to allow you to just press a button on your case and- presto! You actually set your motherboard to overclocking frequencies and voltages WITHOUT RESTARTING. Meaning, you can do this just before you open a game, and you don't have to worry about a thing. Pretty cool, huh? That's what I thought. Just make sure you connect everything properly and set it up correctly!Other than that, this mother has great heat spreading. In fact, I have yet to see any of the sensors increase in temperature of over 5 degrees (Celcius). I swear if you over-heat with this motherboard, you need some SERIOUS help. Putting all of that aside, it has 4PCI-E16 slots that can be ran at all 8x, which is very nice for people who have 4 GPUs laying around to use. Oh, and for those of us who have 5850s (or larger), you can only use 2 of them. Unfortunately, those cards as SO big that they take up 2 PCI-E16 slots each, and so, you just CAN'T fit 4 of them inside of a case! (Duh)Overall? This motherboard is AMAZING! I recommend it to anyone who wants to stick with DDR2 but also wants to get the amazing performance of an AM3 processor. The HT3.0 link supports up to 2.6GHz (JEEZUZ) I recommend an AMD Phenom II 965 Black Edition for this motherboard. You won't really need anything over 4GB of DDR2 RAM. But hell, go with 16GB that it can use for the heck of it!

Comment:
I used g.skill 1066 ram with this motherboard. Had a little problem with the ram but i switched the placement of the ram and it worked fine. Have not had a problem with this board. I'm using a amd 955be processor with it and it works like a charm. Great Job ASUS!!!