An Asus M3N-HT Deluxe/Mempipe!? What's that? Hey, if you are asking that question, you probably forgot already that there's actually another manufacturer other than Intel that makes CPUs; which goes by the name of "AMD". It's interesting how quickly we forget about the days of glory for AMD and their Athlon 64 back in 2003. But the most important thing is that, AMD is still 'sort of' alive for some competition against microprocessor giant Intel to keep the CPU market 'just sort of' nice and fair. When I received the Asus M3N-HT Deluxe/Mempipe motherboard for review last month (Which was still on NDA for the chipset), I was excited to see what kind of motherboards were produced currently on the AMD platform. Combined with NVIDIA's flagship 780a chipset, it certainly brought back memories of the whole NVIDIA-AMD combination that ruled back in the days of the MSI K8N-Neo2 Platinum, DFI LanParty Ultra-D, and the Asus A8N-SLI Premium. Driving down to a local computer store to purchase an AMD CPU to go with this review (I mean, I don't actually have an AMD AM2 CPU, haha), I was contemplating on whether I was going to buy a Phenom X4 or just some low cost Athlon 64 X2. Well, to be honest, if I was going to spend over $200 on a processor, it would probably be an Intel Core 2 Quad and not a Phenom X4. To make a long story short, I went with a mid-priced Athlon 64 X2 4400+. Let me tell you this -- I don't really find it funny to pay over $80 with tax for an AMD dual core CPU at this time, partially because I was forced to let Memory Express rip me off -- and really, everyone knows that they aren't the cheapest place to buy computer parts from. But hey, what the heck -- let's pop in this CPU and see how the M3N-HT Deluxe is worthwhile if you prefer the AMD route for your current AM2 computer or whatever your story may be.
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Source: APH Networks
May 6, 2008, 03:56 PM
