Asus Announces Its AMD 790FX Offering

Author	Hugo Jobling
Published	5th Nov 2007

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Considering we're in Phenom's launch month it seems odd that AMD hasn't formally announced the existence of its forthcoming 790FX chipset. Luckily board partners are doing AMD's job for them by releasing details of their upcoming products and today it's the turn of Asus, with its M3A32-MVP Deluxe.

So, as with all 790 boards, we will see support for socket-940 Phenom, Athlon and Sempron processors, a HyperTransport 3 bus and quad x16 PCI Express 2.0 slots ready for that Quad Crossfire setup you're clearly planning. Other aspects include 8-channel audio, seven SATA connectors (one of which is eSATA) and (of course Gigabit Ethernet.

The board actually comes in two varieties, the standard Deluxe and the Deluxe WiFi-AP. The differentiator, other than the onboard wireless on the latter, is that the WiFi-AP features what is being called Cool Mempipe Technology. What this actually is, is two rather large-looking plates of copper either side of two RAM slots, which then clamp onto your installed memory to aid cooling. While it sounds good in theory, the likely reduction in temperature hardly seems worth the likely cost of the amount of copper. Bonus points for innovation and differentiating from the competition though.

Asus has also done some work on the BIOS, adding features such as 0.02V CPU, Northbridge and Southbridge voltage adjustment which will please overclockers. No pricing or a specific release date is available yet, but soon and around £150 seems likely. Now if we could only have some processors to plug into the boards…

Link:
Asus press release.

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