We've managed to get our hands on a picture of what should be the first AM3 motherboard from Asus and once again the model name code has been changed to indicate that the board uses a new socket, although as AM2+ got the 3, the AM3 boards get the digit 4 and as such the M4A78 Pro is an AM3 board based on the AMD 780G chipset.
The board itself isn't anything spectacular and from what we can tell, this first AM3 board from Asus uses DDR2 memory rather than DDR3. It comes with HDMI, DVI and D-sub connectivity as well as what looks like an optical S/PDIF out, four USB 2.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet, 7.1-channel analog audio and two PS/2 ports.
The board also has a single x16 PCIe slot, two PCIe x1 slots and three PCI slots. In addition to this you'll find six SATA connectors and IDE connector, four headers for an additional eight USB 2.0 ports, a floppy connector and oddly enough the board also appears to have a serial port header.
We'd expect this board to arrive in time for AMD's launch of its AM3 processors and it might even show up at CES. We'd expect many more models to follow based on other AMD chipsets and maybe even some Nvidia chipsets.
