ASUS M3A78-T AMD Motherboard Author:  Matthew Homan Date:  2008.08.26 Topic:  Motherboards Provider:  AMD Manufacturer:  Asus

ASUS M3A78-T AMD Motherboard

A Closer Look:

The Asus M3A78-T is a full size ATX PCB as we mentioned earlier. Looking at the four over head pictures below, the motherboard looks very similar to most other ATX boards. As you can see Asus used a base color of brown to make their board, this may or may not be what ends up in the retail channel as our test boards often come in colors we dont see in the final product. Brown would not be our first choice for a system board color but at least its different from the standard green. We see that there is a total of four memory dimm slots, a massive chipset cooler, 90 degree angled IDE and a dual SATA ports, as well as two PCI-E x16 slots. The third PCI-E slot is a x16 size but only x8 signal.

Main Board view	Closer view of North Bridge and chipset cooler

Close up of South Bridge and SATA ports	PCI and PCIX slots

With this motherboard release, ASUS included their "Q-Connector." This very simple feature is a welcomed feature in assisting the builder with connecting the 20-pin system panel to the computer case. As shown below, the Q-Connector is a small block of pins which allow you to read what pin from the computer case is to connect to. Once all pins are connected the assembler can plug the Q-Connector into the motherboard. This is a God send for those of us who plug the pins into the motherboard after the motherboard and all other cables have been connected to the PC and can't seem to get the pins plugged into the proper locations. The Q-Connector kit also comes with two USB connectors.

Q-Connector	Simple manual showing the case pins and connectors

Here you can see the Q-Connector plugged in

Looking at the two pictures below we get a good glimpse of the new 780G chipset and the South Bridge. The chipset has a rather impressive copper heat sink on it, but since it is both the chipset and an ATI Radeon 3200, it is understandable why. When we look over at the South Bridge the copper heat sink is miniature compared to the chipset heat sink. The SB heat sink is about the size of a stamp and only a quarter of an inch thick. As it may be small and miniature, it is still effective.

AMD 790GX Chipset	South Bridge

Taking a glance at the back panel, we first notice that it has three separate video outputs. These include your standard VGA, and in addition there is a DVI and HDMI. In addition to the three video outputs there is also two USB 2.0, E-Sata, IEEE 1394a, Gigabit Ethernet, and a 7.1 channel sound. If you were planning on using this as a Home Entertainment PC you will be able to get audio from the Optical S/PDIF Out port or through the HDMI.

Input / Output View

Test System:

For doing our testing we are going to be using the AMD Phenom 9950 Black Edition quad core processor with Asus' new 790GX motherboard. As the operating system we chose to use Windows Vista to get full advantages of DirectX 10.1.