ASUS M3N-HT Deluxe Motherboard

One of the first nForce 780a motherboards to fully support HybridPower in BIOS is the ASUS M3N-HT Deluxe. The M3N-HT Deluxe is a high-end motherboard that’s loaded with all the goodies ASUS normally packs into their premium motherboards.

For starters the board features ASUS’ Express Gate feature that was first launched with the P5E3 Deluxe WiFi-AP@n last year. Express Gate refers to the motherboard’s built-in OS, which consists of a Linux distribution from Splashtop. The OS is loaded onto a flash memory chip which rests underneath the primary PCI Express graphics slot.

When booting up the M3N-HT Deluxe motherboard, you’ll be presented with the ASUS Express Gate splash screen. From there you have the option to load up BIOS, boot into the OS on your hard drive, reboot or shut down the computer, or you can click the “Web”, “Skype” and “Chat” icons to load the Splashtop OS. It only takes a few seconds to boot the Splashtop OS, providing you near instant access to the Internet via the Splashtop web browser. The browser is pretty good, we were able to load up popular sites like Youtube, Myspace, CNN, ESPN, etc without any problems, and it supports features like tabbed browsing. Express Gate is a really neat feature that sets ASUS motherboards apart from others.

Another neat feature that the M3N-HT Deluxe supports is Mempipe. Mempipe is short for ASUS’ Memory Heatpipe. With this feature you can connect copper heatpipes to cool your system memory, providing heatpipe cooling for your system RAM. The Mempipe adapter fits directly above the heatpipe cooler that rests on the chipset North Bridge, all you’ll need is a small Philips screwdriver to mount the Mempipe module to the motherboard. Once mounted, you can then adjust the Mempipe module to fit your specific memory modules.


Mempipe is compatible with single and double-sided memory, as well as memory modules with or without heat spreaders. The width of the Mempipe modules is completely adjustable so you can fit it with practically any memory module. The only downside to Mempipe is that you’re obviously limited to cooling just two memory modules. With RAM prices so low, many enthusiasts are picking up four 1GB memory modules.

The M3N-HT is built with all-solid capacitors, and features an 8-phase power design for the CPU. On top of that, an additional 2-phases are devoted for the integrated memory controller and HyperTransport, for a total of 10 phases.


On the backplane of the motherboard, ASUS includes one VGA adapter and one HDMI display output which are tied to the IGP. ASUS then includes an HDMI-to-DVI adapter for driving DVI-equipped displays. You’ll also find digital audio outputs, 4 USB ports, and a Gigabit Ethernet port among the I/O options available on the back of the board.

BIOS

Officially the BIOS of the M3N-HT Deluxe is still a work in progress, so we aren’t going to comment too much on this topic until we see the final BIOS release (our tests were conducted with the 0701 BIOS) that ships with motherboards. Already though it looks like ASUS will be including all the settings enthusiasts will want for OC’ing. HyperTransport frequencies from 200-600MHz are available in 1MHz increments, while Black Edition CPU owners will have CPU multipliers available ranging from 5.0 to 25.0 in increments of 0.5x. PCIe frequencies are also adjustable and the BIOS provides memory speeds up to 1066MHz.

Those of you with B2-stepping Phenom processors will be glad to hear that the TLB patch can be disabled from within BIOS. This is how we performed all of our tests with the Phenom 9600 Black Edition. The motherboard’s BIOS also has settings for SLI-Ready Memory OC’ing as well as ASUS AI Overclock settings that allow you to OC the CPU by set percentages of 3, 5, 8, or 10%. Voltage adjustment for HyperTransport (1.2V-1.5V in increments of 0.02V), North Bridge (1.1-1.7V in increments of 0.02V), and most importantly the CPU (0.775V-1.55V in increments of 0.0125V) are also available. In fact, you can also adjust the voltage of the nForce 200 chip also.