Asus shows off next-gen AMD motherboard

ASUS SHOWED UP at the Games Convention here with a extensive line-up of different products, but one motherboard caught our attention.

The company is readying its Phenom line-up with two upcoming chipsets, RD780 and RD790. We believe that these codenames will turn into real-world products under the name 780X and 790X, if the name convention from 480/580/690 remains the same.

Motherboards are ready, where is the CPU?

The RD780 will be marketed as M3A-MVP, and the spec sheet called for Socket AM2 (actually, it is AM2+, this was a typo), supporting all AM2 processors (Sempr0n, Athlon 64, 64 X2) and new Phenom X4 and X2 ones. Electrical Current will transport to processor using an eight phase power design - overclocking friendly. All capacitors are based on conductive polymer, and Asus marks them as high-quality ones.

When it comes to memory, this board will support DDR2-1066, 800, 667 and 533 MHz ones, and you can expect to see some really good memory bandwidth scores.

There are two PCIe 2.0-compliant x16 slots, spotting support for CrossFire and three PCIe x1 slots. µ