Awww, just when i was hoping it'd be a 790GX µATX.

Nice review, as always very consistent in methodology.

Is it possible to undervolt/underclock the IGP?

One thing I've always noticed with Asus motherboards:
Why do the Northridge Heatsinks have fins in the vertical direction, which is perpendicular to the typical front to back airflow in an ATX case?

Most cases have intake fans at the bottom and exhaust and PSU fans at the top, so horizontal fins wouldnt help much, and vertical ones are vastly better for natural convection, which would play a bigger part in a low airflow system.

Look at the table on page 3.



My guess is they're designed for top-down airflow from the CPU cooler. Same goes for the VRM heatsink.

Thanks. Now the cheeky question: has anyone tried?

One question which I had after reading this is, wouldn't be possible to adjust the powerdraw figures for the processor? At least in idle? We do know how much the board draws at idle with 1.5GHz@1.0V and if we got to know the figure for 2.5GHz@stock (not CnQ) we would have all that is needed to use the powerdraw formula backwards. Simply answering the question 'If we increase clock by 2/5 and decrease voltage by 1/5 and get a power increase of 10W, how much did the CPU draw to begin with?'

And I guess that figuring out how much a RAM stick and a harddrives use in idle shouldn't be extremely hard to find out, right?

Is the lan a pci ethernet, or a pci-e? It is unclear from the review.

The frankly impressive three different NICs their site has downloads for suggest PCI-E.