Asus' M3A78-T motherboard
Less than 12 hours before the deadline for this review, an Asus M3A78-T motherboard arrived on my doorstep. Naturally, I didn't have time to run this board through our gauntlet of performance tests. I did, however, have just enough time to snap a picture and give the board a quick once-over.


The M3A78-T doesn't have SATA port clearance issues like the Gigabyte board, and it has a third PCI Express x16 slot. eSATA connectivity is included, as well, and Asus throws in a 128MB DDR3-1333 performance cache for the Radeon HD 3300. Other notable features include Gigabit Ethernet networking courtesy of Marvell, a Firewire chip from LSI, and a Realtek ALC1200 codec chip that mysteriously isn't listed on the company's website. Typical Asus perks like a built-in Express Gate Linux install and front panel jumper blocks round out the package.

Asus says the M3A78-T carries a suggested retail price of $159, which makes it a little more expensive than the Gigabyte board we're testing today.

Our testing methods
The 790GX's unique blend of what should be scary-fast integrated graphics with a full ATX form factor that boasts CrossFire compatibility makes it a little hard to classify. The fact that board prices are expected to ring in around the $150 makes matters a little easier, since that's exactly the price range of motherboards based on Nvidia's similarly-equipped nForce 750a SLI platform.

Given AMD's unresolved AHCI issues, we've tested the 790GX with the south bridge's Serial ATA controller running in IDE mode. The nForce 750a has no problems running in AHCI mode, which is how we tested it. Both platforms were run using their integrated graphics as the primary output. We also ran an additional set of application performance and power consumption tests with a discrete GeForce 9800 GTX installed.

All tests were run three times, and their results were averaged.

Processor Phenom X4 9850 Black Edition
System bus 2GHz HyperTransport
Motherboard Gigabyte GA-MA790GP-DS4H XFX MD-A72P-7509
Bios revision F1 1.0
North bridge AMD 790GX Nvidia nForce 750a SLI MCP
South bridge AMD SB750
Chipset drivers Catalyst 8.521.1 ForceWare 18.11
Memory size 2GB (2 DIMMs 2GB (2 DIMMs)
Memory type Corsair CM2X2048-8500C5 DDR2 SDRAM at 714MHz
CAS latency (CL) 4 4
RAS to CAS delay (tRCD) 4 4
RAS precharge (tRP) 4 4
Cycle time (tRAS) 12 12
Command rate 2T 2T
Audio codec ALC889A with 1.99 drivers ALC888 with 1.99 drivers
Graphics GeForce 8800 GT 1GB PCIe with ForceWare 177.79 drivers
Hard drive Western Raptor X 150GB
OS Windows Vista Ultimate x86 with Service Pack 1

Thanks to Corsair for providing us with memory for our testing.

All of our test systems were powered by OCZ GameXStream 700W power supply units. Thanks to OCZ for providing these units for our use in testing.

Finally, we'd like to thank Western Digital for sending Raptor WD1500ADFD hard drives for our test rigs.

We used the following versions of our test applications:

The test systems' Windows desktop was set at 1280x1024 in 32-bit color at an 85Hz screen refresh rate. Vertical refresh sync (vsync) was disabled for all tests.

All the tests and methods we employed are publicly available and reproducible. If you have questions about our methods, hit our forums to talk with us about them.