Asus' M4N82 Deluxe motherboard
The only nForce 980a in town

The M4N82 Deluxe is the first, and so far only, motherboard available based on the nForce 980a SLI. Nvidia insists other partners are working with the chipset, but none are apparently ready to announce products just yet. That leaves the Socket AM3 SLI market all to Asus for now, which makes the M4N82's sub-$170 asking price a pleasant surprise.

Perhaps the M4N82's relatively affordable price tag can be explained by the board's support for DDR2 memory rather than the DDR3 commonly associated with Socket AM3. That's not necessarily a bad thing considering current memory prices; the cost of DDR3 has dropped quite a bit in the last six months or so, but DDR2 is cheaper still. For what it's worth, Nvidia does say it has a reference design for the 980a that uses DDR3 memory.

Cosmetically, the M4N82 looks nearly identical to the M4A79T. The layout looks to be similarly excellent, as well.

I can't let a motherboard review pass without mentioning power plug placement, a personal pet peeve of mine. Like its 790FX-based sibling, the nForce board's auxiliary 12V connector is located along its top edge, right where we like to see it. This position ensures clean cable routing not only with traditional enclosures that put the PSU above the mobo, but also with upside-down cases that route power cables behind the motherboard tray.

The M4N82's socket area looks to be about as clean as the M4A79T's, but it's not quite as accommodating. Our Ninja cooler proved a tight fit around the VRM heatsink, which flexed back slightly when the cooler was installed. You may also run into DIMM clearance issues with taller modules, although we didn't with our Corsair Dominator sticks.

If you've been counting power phases, you'll notice that the M4N82 has one fewer than the M4A79T. Both boards feed the CPU core with eight phases, but the M4A79T pipes an additional two phases to the processor's north bridge component, while the M4N82 only dedicates one phase to that part of the chip.

A low-profile south bridge cooler leaves plenty of clearance for longer graphics cards. Gargantuan GeForces won't interfere with the M4N82's edge-mounted ATA or SATA ports, either. However, the fifth SATA port may be blocked by longer cards installed in the board's third PCIe slot.

That's somewhat more of an inconvenience considering that the third slot is where one would install the secondary graphics card in a two-way SLI setup. The blue PCIe x16 slots get a full 16 lanes of bandwidth each, while the black slot in between them is limited to eight lanes.

Like the M4A79T, the nForce board throws in a couple of standard PCI slots. Instead of a fourth PCI Express x16 slot, though, you'll have to make do with an x1.

Wait, haven't we seen this port cluster before? The M4N82's collection of ports neatly matches that of the M4A79T. The only real difference here is the chip behind the Gigabit Ethernet port. Rather than farming out networking to a Realtek controller, the nForce board uses the GigE MAC integrated in the 980a MCP.