Layout

The M4A78T-E presents itself on a black/brown PCB. The components on the whole board are clearly arranged. The board also comes with an onboard graphics solution which can be deactivated and you can instead use the PCIe Slots which support CrossFireX (x8/x.

To deliver a stable current supply ASUS provides an eight plus one phase power design. The CPU therefore gets eight phases and the motherboards core components one. Looking at the capacitors ASUS uses All-Solid-Cap's which have a MTBF of 50'000 hours.

Totally you'll find four DIMM-slots on the M4AT-E. Officially supported are DDR3-1066/1333/1666 with up to 16 GByte capacity. Using overclocking ASUS claims that even DDR3-1800 should be possible.

North- and Southbridge as well as current voltage converters are being held at adequate temperatures via a passive heatpipe cooling solution. There is also plenty of space around the CPU socket to install even todays biggest aircooler without encountering any problems.