Asus' M4A79T Deluxe motherboard
790FX in the flesh

At $190 online, the M4A79T Deluxe looks to be the most expensive Socket AM3 motherboard on the market. Despite the Deluxe moniker, though, the M4A79T is a surprisingly restrained affair.

One often sees supposed enthusiast boards lit up like Japanese Dektora trucks, rippling with more Serial ATA and Gigabit Ethernet ports than even we'd consider sensible and strapped to exotic cooling solutions only the most extreme overclockers actually need. That doesn't say enthusiast to me; it screams Pimp My Motherboard, which really isn't my style. Maybe I'm old school, but I prefer to see motherboards drop the excess and just do the basics well. That seems to have been Asus' goal with the M4A79T Deluxe.

The M4A79T's understated appearance suits the board's nature. The slots and ports are color-coded intelligently but not garishly, and the dark brown board sports copper-colored heatsinks that blend nicely into their surroundings.

I'm not crazy about the brownish color scheme, but at the same time, I'm not that concerned with a motherboard's appearance. Case windows seem to have gone out of style, and most folks run their systems out of view under a desk, anyway. The M4A79T's layout is far more important, and Asus has done a masterful job with it, no doubt aided by the board's relative lack of extraneous peripheral chips and ports.

The area surrounding the M4A79T's CPU socket looks a little more crowded than it actually is. Rows of capacitors and chokes flank the socket on one side, but they're not tall enough to get in the way. The board's PWM and north bridge heatsinks have a little more height. However, they're set back from the socket and didn't cause us any problems.

Like most Phenom boards, the M4A79T's DIMM slots—in this case, the DDR3 variety—snug right up to the socket. This arrangement can create clearance conflicts between extremely large aftermarket coolers and tallish memory modules. We managed to squeeze a massive Scythe Ninja onto the board along with some Corsair Dominators without issue, though.

The board features a modest array of storage ports, including edge-mounted IDE and Serial ATA connectors that leave plenty of room for longer graphics cards. Three of the M4A79T's SATA ports are mounted face-up on the board, but they're positioned to avoid interfering with two-way CrossFire configurations.

The M4A79T Deluxe also features onboard power and reset buttons. These are a nice touch for reviewers and for general troubleshooting, but I'd much rather have a CMOS reset button, either right on the board or preferably in the rear port cluster.

The M4A79T's most Deluxe feature is easily its stack of four PCI Express x16 slots. You only get eight lanes of bandwidth running to each in a four-way CrossFire config, but with gen-two PCIe, that's still 8GB/s of bidirectional bandwidth per slot.

In a nod to those with older expansion cards, the M4A79T features two standard PCI slots. One of them will be blocked by a double-wide graphics card installed into the primary PCIe slot, though. I should also point out that PCI Express slots are backward compatible; the board's physical x16 slots can accommodate x8, x4, and x1 expansion cards.

Asus brings a little something for everyone to the M4A79T's port cluster. Even the PS/2 mouse port has returned, presumably for the KVM-switch crowd, since I can't think of a single PS/2 mouse worth using. Along with half a dozen USB ports, the cluster sports an eSATA port piped up from the south bridge, Firewire fed by a VIA controller, and Gigabit Ethernet powered by a Realtek chip.

Realtek silicon also performs audio codec duties behind the board's analog audio jacks and dual S/PDIF outputs. The codec in question is an ALC1200 that has thus far only appeared on Asus motherboards. However, the chip appears to be little more than a re-badged ALC888, which is really nothing special. Realtek's high-end ALC889A is the codec you want, if only for its Soundstorm-esque real-time Dolby Digital Live encoding capabilities.