ASUS M3A79-T Deluxe Motherboard Review

Bundle and BIOS

The bundle included with the Asus M3A79-T Deluxe is actually pretty good, and it should be for being a top of the line product. You get two CrossFire bridge cables, an IDE cable, six SATA cables, a SATA power cable, a Q-shield, your USB/Firewire header, a Q-Connector, your owner’s manual and Driver and App CD.

The familiar Asus AMI BIOS is a welcome sight as we dive into the setup and tweaking of the board.

The Advanced Page is where we find ourselves spending the bulk of our time. This page has most of the options you will use to get every ounce of performance available.

Once you set the AI Overclocking to Manual, you are ready to set out on your overclocking journey.

FSB can be set up to 600fsb.

PCIE frequency is able to be set up to 150.

CPU-NB frequency multiplier settings…

CPU-NB Link speed…

Vcore can be set all the way to 1.7v at increments of .0125v.

Processor-NB voltage can be set to 1.6875v at .0125 increments.

Vdimm has a max setting of 2.5v.

Hypertransport voltage can be set to 1.5v in .02v increments.

Core/PCIE has a ceiling of 1.4v.

Southbridge has a max setting of 1.4v.

VDDA voltage settings…

Memory Config. page…

DRAM timings config. page: Primary and secondary timings can be adjusted here.

Clock Skew…

CPU configuration page… this is where the ACC can be set for overclocking.

Onboard devices page…

Hardware monitor page…

The tools page is where…

We find the Express Gate Utility that boasts turning your system on and being online in like 5 seconds. Of course, there is no OS loaded, but this could be helpful if you want to get online quick to check a movie time or the impending doom of a Tornado coming your way!

The Tools page also is where we can save and load saved BIOS settings. I love this option. It comes in very handy when overclocking and even if you want to switch back and forth between normal settings and maybe a special gaming setting that you create.