ASUS has it tough. No question about it, everyone loves to hate the front runner. It's hard to remember when they weren't one of the top dogs, and in this business, it's as hard to stay on top as it is to get there. For the last several years, like everyone else, they've been paying the bills by selling Intel-based systems. They kept faith with the AMD crowd however, and have consistently offered a full range of products to support the underdog in the CPU race. All that is paying off, now that the new Phenom II AM3 chips have hit the street, and enthusiasts are once again buying AMD CPUs in earnest.

The new ASUS M4A79T Deluxe motherboard uses some of the latest support chips from AMD: the 790 FX Northbridge, providing 42 lanes of PCi-e 2.0 connectivity and support for quad graphics, and the SB750 Southbridge. The 790FX was part of AMD's "Spider" Platform, launched late in 2007, but it still packs a punch, as we'll see. This is the top specified AM3 board for ASUS, so we'll see what features separate it from the rest of the pack. Let's take a good look at what ASUS brings to the AM3-DDR3 party with their new M4A79T Deluxe motherboard.