ASUS shows its first AM3 motherboards

ASUS has shown its first AM3 motherboards, It´s possible that additional boards will be revealed during the CES, later this month. The ASUS M4A78 Pro is based on AMD´s 780G chipset, the ASUS M4A79 Deluxe will use the AMD 790FX chipset.

The ASUS M4A78 Pro motherboard

ASUS M4A79 Deluxe with FX790 + SB750 chipset

One of the new features of AM3 is the support for DDR3-memory. A strange thing however is that ASUS has decided that both motherboards will feature DDR2-memory slots. It's possible that this decision was made to keep the entry price of the AM3 platform at a minimum. At this point, DDR2 is quite cheap, whereas DDR3-memory is still fairly expensive.

The M4A79 Deluxe has a whopping four PCI-E 2.0 x16 slots, an eSATA connector and five internal SATA-connectors. This board also features the 7.1 HD audio, Gbit LAN and 12 USB 2.0 port functionality. It also has onboard Power and Reset-buttons, as well as the so-called ASUS Express Gate, which is onboard NAND-flashmemory with a stripped Linux system on it. This feature allows users to boot into the Linux operating system very quickly, for example to check email or launch a webbrowser. 

Neither of the motherboards has a pricetag yet.

Tags: ddr2 ddr3 esata hdmi linux sata socket-am3 usb

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