![]() Everything else will continue using the Number Rating System. This is to ensure the most appropriate ratings reflected without the limits of using numbers. Starting from April 30, 2007, Number Ratings has been dropped for motherboards, RAM, and graphics cards. Special thanks to Wil over at Asus for making this review possible. Generally speaking, if you're looking for a Socket AM2 motherboard at this time, the Asus M3N-HT Deluxe is definitely worth considering. Overclocking is also decent on the M3N-HT Deluxe pulling a sweet 3.0GHz out of an Athlon 64 X2 4400+ Brisbane at 300MHz FSB. Performance is fairly consistent - anything poor you see in our charts previously, is really because of the relatively weak CPU we've used as seen in the 3DMark06 scores. In terms of layout, there are certainly room for improvement, most notably the odd placement of floppy connector and a lack of connectors at the back I/O. Great things like Hybrid SLI and support for 3-way SLI is also implemented on the Asus M3N-HT Deluxe, thanks to the NVIDIA 780a SLI chipset. While we haven't had entirely great impressions with NVIDIA chipsets on the Intel platform in the past, my personal experience with NVIDIA chipsets for AMD CPUs has always been excellent - ranging from the original Newcastle and Clawhammer Athlon 64 days, to Winchester, Venice, San Diego, and eventually Manchester and Toledo on Socket 939 with the nForce4 Ultra/nForce 4 SLI, the M3N-HT Deluxe with the 780a SLI chipset on AM2 continued this trend - I am still pleased with this NVIDIA chipset and AMD CPU combination. It's definitely nice to see that there's such great motherboards made for AMD CPUs at this point. Vdroop is not very evident on the M3N-HT Deluxe - the voltage control and regulation is decent on the M3N-HT Deluxe motherboard. I mean, despite our obsession with Intel and their insanely overclockable CPUs, the 65nm AMDs aren't bad in terms of overclocking either (Sans the voltages, but whatever, it's reasonable enough haha) - 30% is really quite decent. Since this is my first time overclocking with this specific chip and motherboard, I don't know how it compares against others, but from my internet sources it's pretty good from what I can see. We were able to boot a bit higher than 3.1GHz, but it wasn't Orthos stable. Generally speaking, in our hours of overclocking and stability testing, the maximum overclock we were able to attain on the Asus M3N-HT Deluxe with the Athlon 64 X2 4400+ Brisbane was 3.0GHz stably. The multiplier is set to 10x for some ease in overclocking (I mean, who can do mental math nowadays if the multiplier is not 10x?) as well as seeing how the NVIDIA 780a SLI chipset can stack in terms of FSB. Blowing 1.45V through the Athlon 64 X2 4400+ Brisbane that runs at stock 2.3GHz (11.5*200), I set the VDDA voltage to 2.728V and lowered the HTT link and memory frequency to make sure nothing gets in the way. For this review, I decided to go nuts and see what maximum overclock I could attain within somewhat reasonable voltage. ![]()
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