AMD has been having an interesting week in the news. They been taking both money and market share from Intel. So I guess it’s both appropriate and strangely coincidental that I’ve been focusing on a lot of their hardware in the past few reviews. We’ve looked at their motherboards and platforms and we will soon be looking at their video cards.
Today we are taking a look at another motherboard for the new Dragon platform. This latest motherboard from Asus is said to support the new Phenom II 955 chip, and has both a rather boastful price tag and feature set. Let’s see if the combination works for the most recognizable motherboard manufacturer in the world.
Features and Specifications
Like the last AMD motherboard we reviewed, the Asus M4A79T Deluxe sports the AMD 790FX chipset. This enables full support for AMD’s current line of Phenom II processors. The board also has native DDR3 1600 memory support, and full CrossfireX support. Those features are pretty well expected at this level.
Asus adds a little extra with some of their special features. This includes interesting little nuggets like ExpressGate, which allows you to boot into a functional OS in about 5 seconds. Asus has also paid particular attention to the design of their board, implementing components and features that are both stable and power saving. If you want to get the full rundown, you can check out the product home page.
Pricing for the Asus M4A79T Deluxe runs a little higher then most of it’s compatriots. Whereas the GIGABYTE board we last reviewed clocks in at about $180 USD, the Asus board is regularly seen at $200 – $210 USD. On the surface this extra premium doesn’t seem justified, but it leaves one wondering what you get for that little extra bit of money.
The Turbo Button Makes a Return?
Those of a certain vintage will know exactly what I’m talking about when I speak of a Turbo Button in reference to personal computers. Any young whipper snappers that are confused can head to Wikipedia. Needless to say something like this hasn’t been seen for a long while.
Asus has decided to implement something similar, but instead of making your computer slower it speeds it up. The turbo button is tied into the power button, and when pressed it’ll apply a pre-defined performance profile that you setup in Asus’ AI Suite software. Your computer should then get a slight boost in performance for gaming and other tasks.
Taking a Closer Look
In the review of the GIGABYTE GA-MA790FXT-UD5P motherboard, I had cited a particular design concern I’ve seen on all AMD based AM2+ and AM3 boards I’ve looked at. That particular concern is how close the CPU socket is to the memory slots. If you are using RAM with really tall heatsinks, and want to use a huge CPU cooler, the two will most likely be at odds with one another. Well the Asus M4A79T Deluxe has a little bit of space between the CPU socket and RAM slots, thanks to the addition of a couple of capacitors in the area. I doubt this was the intent behind the placement of these capacitors, but it may have just worked out in their favour.
Since we’re kinda-sorta tangentially on the topic, I should mention that Asus has definitely made sure that power on the M4A79T Deluxe is clean and stable. Like many other high end boards, Asus is using only 100% all high-quality conductive polymer capacitors on this board. They have a stupidly long lifespan, and provide more consistent and stable power then electrolyte based capacitors. There is no confirmation on the box about whether or not the capacitors are Japanese in origin, but they’re still better then the alternative.
To keep all the important components that aren’t the CPU cool, Asus has implemented a rather large passive heatsink and heatpipe setup. They’ve placed large heatsinks on the MOSFETs and Northbridge, and a smaller heatsink on the Southbridge. This is a tied together using a heatpipe, ensuring that ever under the most stressful of operations everything is kept cool.
When it comes time to hook up drives, Asus has you mostly covered. I say mostly because of the strange number of SATA ports preset on the M4A79T Deluxe. Usually there’s an even number present like 4, 6, or 10, but on this board there’s 5 SATA ports. There’s also an IDE port next to the SATA ports. As for the way the ports are positioned, they shouldn’t cause any problems for most configurations. The ports that are at a right angle sit straight in line with the second x16 PCIe slot, and sit perfectly under a dual slot video card. The three straight up ports right next to those don’t interfere with the video card either.
A Tough Hook Up
As for board layout, everything is there but it isn’t quite as well thought out as the GIGABYTE board we just reviewed.
The front panel audio header is buried in the lower back corner of the board, which will make it difficult to reach with the front panel cable on most cases. The floppy connector is also way the heck down there. Luckily if you actually still use a floppy drive you can find cables in various lengths. Everything else is in a fairly neutral position, and should cause any problems for most. Oh and Asus finally implement something I’ve been missing with their boards: onboard power and reset switches. These are remarkably useful for initial setup of the system, as well as diagnostics and troubleshooting.
Plugging Everything In…
Since the subject of board layout does inevitably come up, we should look at how Asus has decided to setup the expansion slots on the M4A79T Deluxe. Whereas GIGABYTE’s GA-MA790FXT-UD5P limits your CrossfireX options to two Radeon HD 4890X2 cards, or similar dual GPU solutions, the Asus board allows you to go with four single slot cards, or any other number of combinations.
Both setups have their benefits and setbacks, since they both allow you different forms of expansion. The only plus I can think of would be awarded to the GIGABYTE board as they have seven expansion slots, including one x1 PCIe slot right above the first video card. Still the Asus board gives you a lot more adaptability in what kind of cards you can install.
Finally we arrive at the rear of the M4A79T Deluxe. The ports used here are fairly typical for Asus motherboards, and we get to see where the sixth SATA port went. I’m guessing the bus for it was re-routed to this eSATA port on the back of the board. From left to right we have PS/2 ports for mouse and keyboard, two USB port, digital audio outputs, FireWire and eSATA port, two more USB ports, GigE LAN and two more USB ports, and the analogue audio outputs.
The Accessories
Rounding off our look at the board is a peek at the included free stuff that comes with the board…
The Asus accesory pack includes most of the usual suspects. Here we have enough SATA cables for every port on the board, as well as an IDE cable. If you need to hook up a floppy you are out of luck. We also have two Crossfire bridges, so you can quickly and easily setup CrossfireX on this board. Asus exclusives include the Q-Panel and Q-Connectors though things don’t get interesting till we drill down to the documentation. Asus has included the usual thick user manual and drivers DVD, but it’s a small insert found in the manual that drew my attention.
Test System Setup
Since we are comparing this directly to the GIGABYTE GA-MA790FXT-UD5P motherboard we last reviewed, it only made sense to install the same test rig in this board that we plugged into that board. Since the Asus M4A79T Deluxe is also part of the “Dragon: Reloaded” platform, it was quite easy to pick those components. Here’s what was used:
- AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition CPU
- Corsair XMS3 DHX 4GB DDR3-1600 Dual Channel Memory Kit
- Gigabyte Radeon HD 4890 1GB PCIe Video Card
- Western Digital VelociRaptor 300GB 10000rpm SATA2 Hard Drive
- HighSpeed PC Top Deck Tech Station
- Lian Li MAXIMA Force Extreme PS-A650GB 650W Power Supply
We ran the board through the same synthetic and real world tests run in the last review, in an attempt to directly compare performance in areas like CPU performance, memory, I/O, and gaming. The results will not only give you an idea of what each board offers, but will let us decide which board we are using in our AMD test rig going forward. I had to update the BIOS on the Asus board, as the one shipped with out test board was incompatible with the Phenom II 955. Hopefully that is corrected in boards shipping to the general public.
Opening with the ExpressGate
Since this my second review of an Asus board that features ExpressGate (the first being the ASUS M3A78-T), I should probably talk about it before installing Windows Vista x64 amnd jumping into benchmarks.
Basically this feature is an on-chip version of Linux that is found on the motherboard. The purpose behind this is if you need info quickly and don’t want to wait for your OS, you can boot into this and get what you need. From within ExpressGate, you can go online, perform a few chat functions, view photos, and even play a few games. You can launch it prior to boot up, and since it’s stored on a ROM soldered on the motherboard it loads remarkably fast.
It should be noted that to activate ExpressGate, you need to install it from the drivers DVD. This means you still need to go through the rigmarole of installing your OS fully. Once that is complete, and the DVD is installed, you are good to go.
The First of Many Tests
We started off our tests with PCMark Vantage, set to default settings. We only picked the composite test, the TV and Movies test, and Productivity tests because they represent what we are best trying to achieve with the first round of tests without encroaching on our other benchmarks. Basically we use this test to get a general sense of system performance before really digging in.
In that vain things are looking good for the Asus M4A79T Deluxe, if only just. The board best it’s direct competitor by a marginal amount in all but the productivity tests. We’ll see how this plays out in the other benchmarks.
SiSoft Sandra Memory Bandwidth
For our fully synthetic benchmarks, we turned to SiSoftware’s Sandra suite of tools. This program tests the raw speed of a particular component, and can be a good way of measuring how another component affects the target of the particular test. Rather then relying on the built in database for these tests, we actually had something to compare against.
Since the Asus M4A79T Deluxe and the GIGABYTE GA-MA790FXT-UD5P board are so similar in specification, and using the same components, there wasn’t much deviation between the two. The GIGABYTE board did come out faster, but the amount by which it bested the Asus M4A79T Deluxe is so statistically insignificant as to not matter. This is effectively a tie.
SiSoft Sandra – Processor Arithmetic
The same story is told in the Processor Arithmetic benchmarks. These tests place pressure on the CPU with the most basic of functions; testing both integer and floating point math calculation. It’s all very dry, and unfortunately so is our result. The Asus M4A79T Deluxe deviates little from the baseline results we established in our review of it’s competitor.
SiSoft Sandra – Processor Multimedia
At the risk of sound like a broken record, nothing really changes when we try testing Processor Multimedia. These tests are pretty self explanatory, testing the rendering and display of media. Once again the Asus M4A79T Deluxe comes extremely close to it’s competitor in terms of performance, with such a little difference barely registering. I think we need to look at some other aspects of testing, before this gets to be the most boring round of benchmarks ever.
Hard Disk I/O: Part Deux
In our AMD Platform Showdown, we found that the latest boards sporting AMD chipsets were taking significant hit in hard drive performance. I have yet to find out exactly why. There’s speculation that it’s a driver or chipset issue. This review should give us some insight into whether or not it’s a hardware issue, possibly relating to the BIOS or something on the mobo itself.
Our first test with this in mind both shows general promise and an advantage in Asus’ direction. The PCMark Vantage Hard Drives test showed a 10% performance increase in favour of the M4A79T Deluxe. That’s actually a decent amount, and not a statistical anomaly. Even better then that, it’s actually up there with the fastest board in our showdown.
The raw transfer speed results we achieved in the SiSoftware Sandra Physical Disks benchmark tell much the same story. Though it’s still not in the triple digits, the results posted by the Asus board are 3% faster then the GIGABYTE board, and are coming close to slower of the two platforms.
These performance increases might be due to the lower access times posted by the Asus board. We managed to get a confirmed, replicatable access time below 7ms with our WD VelociRaptor. I wouldn’t mind having a decent SSD to really settle the score on these boards. For now we’ll have to work with what we have, and what we have is slightly improved I/O performance. It doesn’t have me jumping for joy, but I like where we are heading.
Does It Have Game?
Once we have I/O out of the way, it’s time to get down to the business of gaming. Like our desktop tests, we start the gaming tests with a Futuremark produced testing suite; 3DMark Vantage in this case. Like PCMark Vantage, 3DMark Vantage uses it’s own internal components and engine to test various aspects related to gaming performance.
If you though the desktop performance numbers we a close heat, check out the results above. 3DMark Vantage produced results between the two boards that were so close to each other, any deviation can simply be chalked up to operating conditions on the computer at the time. Hopefully some real world game tests will break things up a little.
Crysis
It appears to have split things up a little in Crysis. Though 1 or 2 FPS in other shooters aren’t much, the engine Crysis uses is so punishing that when calculating averages those median 1 or 2 FPS can mean 5 or 7 FPS difference on either end of the average. When running in “Very High” mode, like we were here, that can make the difference between moving through an immersive 3D world and watching a slideshow. Unfortunately for Asus, the GIGABYTE board is the victor here, though once again not by much.
World in Conflict
World in Conflict is a little more forgiving with its 3D rendering. This game is fully 3D top down RTS title, and since it’s units are smaller it provides for a much smoother experience. The results posted in our tests are indeed so small as to be a non-issue. Both boards are quite competent in gaming.
Overclocking
The conversation on overclocking with the Asus M4A79T Deluxe is actually a fairly short one. With our modest attempts at overclocking our test CPU, I was able to push it to 3.6GHz like the World Champion GIGABYTE board. However, at that clock speed a little more finessing was needed to get it to run stable whereas the GIGABYTE board was clearly made to pump out high frequencies under extreme conditions. I had to bring it back to ~3.5GHz to get things to run.
If you are into running some serious clock speeds with extreme measures over and above air cooling, then this is not your board since it already rolls with a small handicap. However, for general use and the fact that Asus has provided their “Turbo Button” feature, I could see this board making a great addition in a gaming rig where overclocks are much more modest and are done with stability in mind.
The Sound of Silence?
There’s a certain degree of irony with the heading, especially considering how bad the onboard audio on the Asus board was. Though is was perfectly listenable, the rated SNR pulled from RightMark was in the lower 80dBA rating. This introduced a little more noise on the analogue line then what was present on the GIGABYTE board. We once again didn’t test the digital output because of limitations in RightMark, but it is of course rated much higher then the analogue output.
Final Thoughts and Conclusion
The Asus M4A79T Deluxe is undoubtedly a competent AMD based AM3 motherboard. It has similar features to many other top end AMD motherboards made for the Dragon Reloaded platform. The layout is ok, and can work in most system configs. It even made some performance improvements in what was originally not so great I/O performance when compared to its GIGABYTE cousin.
The most significant flaw that comes to mind is the price tag. The board is as good as the GIGABYTE board we last reviewed, but it isn’t good enough to warrant a $20 – $30 price premium. Folks who are building custom systems these days are very price conscious. An extra $20 is nothing to sneeze at, and might easily go towards another part or accessory.
Other then economical concerns, there are some issues with performance. It doesn’t approach the GIGABYTE when it comes to overclocking prowess. After all, the GIGABYTE board is the world overclock champion on the AMD platform. The point against the Asus was the slightly noisier analogue audio output when compared with the GIGABYTE.
I was slightly annoyed by having to update the BIOS to get the system to boot. Not for the process itself, as that was easy, but I just don’t like it from the end user perspective. Not everyone has multiple processors they can stick into a mobo to get it to boot and upgrade. Many would have to spend extra money to go to a computer store and get them to do the upgrade for them or the hassle of having to take a restock to exchange a board that should be working off the line.
In the end, the Asus M4A79T Deluxe just can’t get out from in the shadow of a very worthy adversary in the GIGABYTE GA-MA790FXT-UD5P (I hate typing that!). The ASUS is a great board, with solid performance, a decent feature set and it does have a one up with support for CrossfireX. However, pricing and overall performance including overclocking issues just keep it from shining brighter.
If you need a board with this particular layout and need to have CrossfireX, I would be able to recommend it. However in a straight up comparison to other boards, it still comes in just a close second. Hopefully as we review a few more boards in the next while we’ll have a better picture as to where the ASUS fits in.
Pros
- Solid performance
- Excellent features
- Layout has everything one would need
- Makes some gains in I/O performance
Cons
- Not the best overclocker
- BIOS update was required to get it running
- More expensive then similar competition
Overall Rating: 8.0/10.0
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