Founded in 1989 in Taiwan, ASUS is one of the most well respected IT company in the world. With 33% of the 2007 PC using an ASUS motherboard, there's no question about the company's success. This comes from high quality full range of products designed to appeal to everyone from the casual computer user, to the hardcore gaming enthusiast.



Using the NVIDIA GeForce 9300 chipset, the ASUS P5N7A-VM is a microATX motherboard that packs a decent punch when it comes to integrated graphic solutions. The GPU used on the P5N7A-VM si Shader Model 4.0 compliant and provides PureVideo hardware acceleration for HD media. The platform also support Hybrid SLI, which means that if at some point you want to add a PCI Express graphics card for higher resolutions and the likes, the added card will perform even better than its default specs because it is being helped by the onboard GPU. HybridPower also offers advanced power management techniques so that when the additional graphics card isn't needed (like when you are not gaming), all the necessary tasks are loaded to the onboard little brother and the main card is placed in some kind of standby mode for improved power savings.



The board also comes with CUDA support. This allows programmers to use the C programming language in developing multithreaded applications that run on the GPU as opposed to the single, dual or quad core CPUs. A modern day GPU has hundreds of parallel processing units. NVIDIA PhysX is a gaming feature build to process more complex physics computations in different game scenarios. This is supposed to provide for increased realism, but I doubt the onboard graphics is powerful enough power to render graphics and physics and at the same time provide decent frame rates. But if you plug in an add-on card, then that's another story.



As for video output solutions, the board comes full with DisplayPort, HDMI, VGA and DVI. That's everything anyone can ask for these days. And if you are in a hurry and need to send an e-mail or contact someone immediately using Skype, ASUS provides this board with Express Gate technology which doesn't boot up the default OS, but instead runs an build in small Linux based OS and in less than 5 seconds you'll be up and running. Just don't expect to play the next Tomb Raider release with this feature.



On the default features list we find things like 12 USB 2.0 ports, internal and external SATA II connectors, Gigabit Ethernet and a whole bunch of other stuff.