Asus' M4A78T-E
The joys of simplicity

Over the years, enthusiast-oriented motherboards have become increasingly loaded down with extraneous frills and extras, auxiliary peripherals included. I suppose it's easy for marketing droids to sell the idea that masses of additional slots, ports, LEDs, and heatpipes add value. But part of me longs for the simplicity of a feature set that's been stripped of fluff and pared down to the bare essentials.

Asus looks to have taken just such an approach with the M4A78T-E. The board is certainly no slouch in terms of its features or connectivity options, but it doesn't go overboard, either. Heck, it even looks unassuming, dressed up in brown and blue with nary a piece of flare or unnecessary bling in sight.

The M4A8T-E is hardly the sort of board that grabs your attention. Take a closer look at the details, though, and a number of subtle little touches come into focus. The layout is incredibly spacious, for example. Asus' engineers haven't had to squeeze in a multitude of extra onboard components, and it shows.

Those board designers deserve particular props for avoiding a pet peeve of mine: iffy power plug placement. They've smartly located the auxiliary 12V power plug—a four-pin jack in this case—along the top edge of the board where cabling won't break up airflow between the CPU cooler and the rear chassis exhaust. Of course, if you have one of those funky upside-down cases that puts the PSU below the motherboard rather than above it, you'll probably need an extension cable for the auxiliary 12V line.

AMD-based systems typically put their DIMM slots very close to the CPU socket, and the M4A78T-E is no exception. However, there's still enough room for Corsair's taller Dominator DIMMs to play nicely with Scythe's Ninja CPU cooler, provided you're not shy about bending a few of the Ninja's fins. The heatsinks that dot the board's north bridge chip and power regulation circuitry are low-profile designs that should do a good job of avoiding larger aftermarket coolers. And wouldn't you know, there isn't a single heatpipe in sight.

The M4A78T-E feeds its socket with eight power phases for the processor, and it has another for its integrated north bridge component. Of course, not just the number of power phases matters—the key is the cleanliness of the power delivered to the CPU. Remember that a few pages from now when we dip into some rather interesting overclocking results.

We don't find any clearance issues moving south. The board's low-profile south bridge heatsink won't interfere with lengthy graphics cards, and the IDE and Serial ATA ports are nicely out of the way. If you're wondering where the SB750's sixth SATA port is, it's pulling eSATA duty in the rear port cluster.

Asus loads up the M4A78T-E's expansion slots in pairs, led by a couple of PCI Express x16 slots. Those slots only deliver eight lanes of gen-two connectivity to CrossFire configurations, but thanks to PCIe 2.0's higher signaling rate, the bandwidth available is equivalent to a true dual-x16 implementation with first-generation PCI Express. Should you pursue a CrossFire setup of the double-wide variety, you'll still be able to get at one PCI and one PCIe x1 slot, too.

Thanks to the M4A78T-E's 790GX chipset, though, there's no strict need to add a discrete graphics card. The board's integrated Radeon HD 3300 provides HDMI and DVI output ports, alongside a standard VGA connector. Asus also throws in a digital S/PDIF audio output to ride alongside a full complement of analog audio jacks.

The rest of the port cluster fills out as expected, although you don't get a PS/2 mouse port. Since I can't think of a single PS/2 mouse that's still worth using, that's probably not a big deal. Diehard clickety-clack keyboard fans can still plug vintage models into the PS/2 port provided.