Asus M3A78-EMH HDMI Author:  Michael Lynch Date:  2008.04.11 Topic:  Motherboards Provider:  AMD Manufacturer:  Asus

Asus M3A78-EMH HDMI

A Closer Look:

The Asus M3A78-EMH HDMI is a micro ATX form factor PCB. Looking at the four over head pictures below, the motherboard looks very similar to most other micro ATX boards. One thing that changing with motherboards is the die used for making the board itself, Asus used a base color of brown to make their board. We see that there is a total of four memory dimm slots, which some micro ATX motherboards only have two. Asus offers the standard expansion slot options: one PCI Express x16 slot, one PCI Express x1 slot, two PCI slots.

Processor Side View	Memory Side View

Card Slot Side View	Input / Output View

On the board is six sata connectors which will be connected to either your hard disk drive or optical drives.

SATA Ports

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 780G Chipset	South Bridge 700

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. Unfortunately with the DVI and HDMI, you cannot use both at the same time, it is either one or the other, and once you know which you want to use, then located behind the HDMI connection is a jumper which needs to be set accordingly. In addition to the three video outputs there is also four USB 2.0, Gigabit Ethernet, and a 7.1 channel sound. Unfortunately they didn't include Fire Wire, eSata, or an optical / coaxial audio connections. If you were planning on using this as a Home Entertainment PC, note that you will either need to get the digital audio from either the HDMI or by adding a discrete sound card.

Input / Output View	Input / Output View

Test System:

For doing our testing we are going to be using the AMD Phenom 9600BE quad core processor with Asus' new 780G motherboard. As the operating system we chose to use Windows Vista to get full advantages of DirectX 10.1.