ASUS M4A79XTD EVO AM3 AMD 790X ATX AMD Motherboard

Pros: Worked well for about a year

Cons: Became unreliable during second year of ownership. Spent countless hours trying to identify problems. Finally thought must be the motherboard. Took it to Staples for diagnostic. Bingo: motherboard bad!!!.
Initiated first Asus RMA USPC341452 on 4/11/13, sent it to Jeffersonville. Board came back supposedly fixed, poor packaging and just a Asus Service Shipping List form/no, zero comments about what was fixed or any other dialog. Reinstalled this board and immediately showed it did not Post! Nothing no screen, no beeps, dead as it can be!!!. Initiated a second new RMA USPC350894 and sent it back to Jeffersonville. Bought a new Asus Sabertooth 990FX R2.0 and installed the CPU (AMD Phenom 365 and Crucial Memory from the old board. So far everything is working just fine. Should have done this in the first place!!!

Other Thoughts: Tip for others: Don't exclude the motherboard if you encounter problems. Check all the bad comments about this particular Asus M4A79XTD EVO on this site. Consider your time and money. I spent 2 shipping charges and a Staples Diagnostic Fee. Finally: tell Asus to improve their communication when they are doing a RMA. Why not include some comments when they return the repaired??? item to the customer. Customers are mad as hell when they have this experience!

Pros: Plenty of SATA II and USB ports.

Cons: Like many other reviewers, I also experienced the BSOD problem. Spent many hours troubleshooting, reloading, reconnecting and replacing. Finally removed all memory except 1 DIMM and no BSOD. Added second DIMM to same channel and BSOD every few minutes. Moved second DIMM to second channel and haven't had a BSOD since (approx. 1 year).

Other Thoughts: Being unable to fully utilize this board has been somewhat disappointing and frustrating. Not going to pay to replace at this point. Will just live with it until it's time to upgrade.

Pros: I have used this board for three years and a week, it was rock solid awesome for over two years of that time. I enjoy the ease of installation and the options it provided meet me needs perfectly when I had ordered the equipment.

Cons: This past several months, the time the board takes to post just keeps getting to be longer and longer. I had tried swapping ram, messing with bios. It just seems to be getting old. When I build I plan to keep the PC as my main for about four years, and then pass it on to my secondary computer that I allow my children to use. At this time, I may need to consider picking up something else for them as I feel this may be getting closer to its end of life faster than expected.

Other Thoughts: I wish I looked earlier, because it turns out my warranty ended... 11 days ago. I have had Asus before, and will most likely buy Asus again. Just feel that this board should have given me more of a life span than it did.

Manufacturer Response:

Dear Valued Customer,

We're sorry to hear about your experience with the motherboard. Have you checked the health of your hard drive / SSD to see if its performance may have degraded?A failing drive can make it seem slow to boot / load OS. Please try a basic hardware setup with no drive connected, then again with drives connected. You can also try load BIOS defaults (F5 in BIOS), and unplug or disable onboard devices that are not used, which should help speed up POST proccess. If you have an questions or need additional support, please feel free to contact me below. Thank you.

For support information, please visit http://support.asus.com. For service, visit http://service.asus.com. For motherboard warranty, visit http://www.service.asus.com/warranty.aspx#!Motherboard%20Warranty/c1c20; Refurbished products/accessories: http://www.service.asus.com/warranty.aspx#!refurbished-warranty/c16us. For RMA status, visit: http://am.eservice.asus.com/rmaweb/search/rmCustomerQueryAction.do?.

Regards,
Benson
ASUS Customer Loyalty
cl-benson@asus.com

Pros: Reliable, durable, affordable, upgradable, nice features!

Cons: none

Other Thoughts: Great compatibility, good owners manual. I'd recommend it to a friend.
My stupid self accidentally improperly grounded the board and started it up. I fixed that after noticing and to my surprise, the board still works with no problems.

Pros: Great MoBo... When it worked.

Cons: Progressively got worse as the MoBo aged until today. Now, when it loads fully into Windows (IF it boots at all) it will freeze after less than an hour or bsod.

Other Thoughts: We've done hours of troubleshooting to come to the conclusion that it is a failing mother board causing the problems. Video card is fine, ram was memtested for hours, did more than one clean install of windows, flashed the bios... It's just really sad because I got ASUS because I trusted them to make a quality product and that's obviously not what happened. It's been 2 years almost to the day since I bought it and after having a Dell that lasted for nearly 8, I'm disappointed. I don't want to send it in just to get the same faulty board back. Not worth the time or money.

Manufacturer Response:

Dear Valued Customer,

We're sorry to hear about the issue you had with the motherboard. Please RMA it using the online submittal form at: http://vip.asus.com/eservice/usa_rmaserv.aspx or call us at 1-812-282-2787 at your earliest convenience so that our technicians can look into the instability issue, repair and/or replace as necessary. Thank you.

For support information, please visit http://support.asus.com. For service, visit http://service.asus.com. For motherboard warranty, visit http://www.service.asus.com/warranty.aspx#!Motherboard%20Warranty/c1c20; Refurbished products/accessories: http://www.service.asus.com/warranty.aspx#!refurbished-warranty/c16us. For RMA status, visit: http://am.eservice.asus.com/rmaweb/search/rmCustomerQueryAction.do?.

Regards,
Benson
ASUS Customer Loyalty
cl-benson@asus.com

Pros: Just thought I'd leave a review, even though I wouldn't recommend getting one of these motherboards now. It's a little out of date...I'm in the process of seeking out a replacement myself. But this board has never failed me once in the two years I've owned it...I'm really surprised to see all the negative reviews. In fact, ASUS boards have always worked rock solid for me without any real issues whatsoever.

Cons: None...other than it's outdated and only offers USB 2 and SATA II.

If it had come equipped with SATAIII I wouldn't even be thinking about replacing it.

Other Thoughts: I've always used ASUS in all my builds but will probably go with Gigabyte this time around. I've always had great luck with ASUS but they don't appear to making a board in the price range I'm looking at right now.

But this gets five stars in my book...I've had two or three ASUS boards over the last ten years and have never had any issues with any of them.

Pros: This board is still working without any major hiccups, other than the old intermittent SATA port issue with 3-4 bytes per second on boot-up, not the normal 3Gb/s it should be.

Cons: My first review was on 9/7/2010, titled "SATA Port FAIL". Well the board continued with the same intermittent issue. It's so intermittent the motherboard could work fine for a month or two before it would freeze on system boot-up.

I had originally talked to some fellow ASUS support, but the guy was no help. When I told him how long it took time-wise with the no OS boot-up occurring, his attitude was, send it to us (at my cost) and we "might" be able to find the problem. We (ASUS) would have to first verify the problem that I'm having before they could fix or replace the motherboard with no guarantees.
This response just doesn't work for me as I can't afford the down time waiting for a replacement.

Anyway, I found my only "work-around" other than to RMA the faulty thing, was to shut down the pc, swap the drive SATA connector onto the next empty port and reboot. For some strange reason this tricked the southbridge chipset into resetting itself, and the SATA 3Gb/s rated speed would return to normal.

Other Thoughts: After a year and a half of initial ownership, frustration, and procrastination the problems were SOLVED by purchasing a SYBA SATA III 2-port 6Gbps ASM1061 PCIe ($12.00 on that auction site I can't name)) and installing it in the empty PCIe x16 slot.
To-date I presently have a fast and stable system, with the bonus of having a 6Gb/s SATA card to run my Intel SSD without the need to perform any major upgrades at this time.

Manufacturer Response:

Dear Valued Customer,

We're sorry that you had intermittent issues with the SATA ports on this motherboard. We do suggest in your case to RMA the board in so that our technician can test the ports for functionality, and if faulty we will repair and/or replace as necessary. We're apologize for the incovenience caused by having to send the board in.

For motherboard support, please visit http://support.asus.com. For service information, visit http://service.asus.com.

Regards,
Benson
ASUS Customer Loyalty
cl-benson@asus.com

Pros: It has all the features you would expect with a M/B at this price range.
ASUS build fine quality products.

Cons: No cons, no problems at all.

If there is a con of any type.It's probably that ASUS ( & other manufacturers ) need to put a disclaimer on the box that if you don't check the memory QVL.You stand a good chance of ANY motherboard not working properly.
Unless you educate yourself on the proper way of building a PC. Expect to have BSOD's & other issues.
You can't just pick a M/B & a set of memory that your buddy told you to get cuz it " looks cool " & expect it to work.
Here's a tip from a 12+ yr PC builder.
Pick the board you like.Then, go to their website.Find the board you picked.Then, find what memory they used/tested on the board. ( for ASUS it's called a Qualified Vender List = QVL )
Go to NewEgg & find a memory that matches from the list in the size ( Gigabite ) that you want. Then order it with the board.
If you buy memory from the QVL list of any manufacturer.You drastically enhance your chances of a successful build.

Other Thoughts: This board works perfecly fine. I cannot remember the last time I've ever had a problem with an ASUS Motherboard.
It works fine you noobs.

Pros: The Board ran great for the first 7 or 8 months. All in all, it had great features for the price.

Cons: Started having instability 8 months after purchase. BSODs would kill any long term use of the computer. Replaced a hard drive, graphics card, and tried three different sets of RAM (all of which ASUS recommends to use in the board). The mobo would boot if two sticks of ram were in separate channels (dual channels stopped working), but now, 1 year and 10 months after purchase, it won't boot or stay running longer than a couple of minutes.

Other Thoughts: Internet searches have convinced me that this board can be very sensitive to certain components and brands. I have a friend who has the same board with absolutely no problems. Seems to be many people having trouble getting RAM paired up and stable with this model. It's a shame I never got to try using the Overclocking tools.

Manufacturer Response:

Dear Valued Customer,

We're sorry to hear about the instability issue on this motherboard. Please try updating to the latest BIOS and load defaults, update drivers/software, or restore the OS to an earlier state to see system still BSOD or occurs less often. You can also use a BSOD analyzer to see help pinpoint what cased it. If no change after trying the above, please call us at 1-812-282-2787 at your earliest convenience to request a RMA for the motherboard.

Regards,
Benson
ASUS Customer Loyalty

Pros: Great board! been running it non-stop for about 2 1/2 years now. First with a C2 965BE at 3.8. Then, for the last 6 months or so, a 960T. Was able to unlock the 960T on this board and I can run it at 4.0 in both X4 and X6 'mode'. This with all 4 DIMMs populated with 1600 DDR3.

Cons: ???

I don't like that the front panel plug ins are right over the PSU. Looks like they've fixed that with the newer EVOs though. Would purchase another ASUS EVO board in the future based on my experience with this one.