Guillotine

Okay… Another reason I haven’t posted much in the past couple weeks (aside from a brief marathon involving watching all 167 episodes of InuYasha) was that my 2 year old PC finally started showing signs of getting ready to kick the bucket. I started getting warnings on the Intel monitor that the CPU was running about 50-60 degrees F above normal (actually went up to the terminal temp range several times). I had intended to wait until next year hoping to score an i7 after the prices dropped a bit, but it wasn’t meant to be, so I spent the past week rebuilding my PC (most of that time reloading software).

Read more after the jump…

So after several days of staring at motherboards and CPUs I finally decided I was going to give AMD another try (the last time I used AMD was back when they came out with the 486 DX4 CPU and it wasn’t impressive or very stable). I finally decided on the Asus M3A78-EM motherboard coupled with an Athalon 64 X2 5200+ CPU. The choice wasn’t too difficult… XfX and MSI both carry similar boards, but the XfX seems to get some very mixed reviews while the MSI runs about $20 more than the Asus. Having used Asus in the past it was the clear winner in my eyes.

The good… The board is based on the latest 780G chip set, and while some people seem to have troubles with these first boards implementing it the M3A78-EM seems to be pretty stable. The first thing one will notice about this board is the massive amount of ports on the back. 6 USB 2.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet, 8 Channel sound, VGA, DisplayPort, DVI, HDMI, ESATA, optical audio, and iEEE 1394 (firewire). That’s quite a bit of connectivity there, and that’s not even the end. On the motherboard itself there are an additional 3 USB 2.0 headers allowing a total of 12 ports, a iEEE 1394 header for an additional firewire port, 5 SATA ports, and the rest of the usual suspects (PCIe X 16, PCIe X 2, Floppy header, IDE header, etc). This board can probably connect to everything you own and still have ports left over.

Other features of the board include built in ATI Radeon HD3200 graphics which is not a bad GPU overall though power gamers may want more (hence the PCIe X 16 slot). It also has ATI’s Crossfire technology, so if you purchase one of the new ATI Radeon cards (and run Windows Vista) you can operate the the onboard video and the add on card in conjunction to get dual GPU performance. And, although I opted for an Athalon 64 X 2 CPU the board does support 140w AMD CPUs allowing it to handle the latest Phenom X4 CPUs. The onboard audio seems to be the usual fare (although I haven’t really noticed much improvement in the audio department since the SoundBlaster Platinum, so pretty much any audio is decent and effective these days).

The bad… Not much bad to speak of. The only issue I had was that it only has one IDE header so I had to dump my IDE CD writer, but with SATA DVD writers running from $30 these days it’s not much of an issue, and honestly I already have an external LG DVD writer which I prefer since today’s computers tend to need lots of cooling one less heat producing drive in the case is a good thing. In case anyone was wondering… Yes this board will boot from a USB drive. The only other thing that gave me headaches also involved the IDE header. They placed it sideways on the board so it actually faces the front of the PC when installed… Right under the area where the hard drive bays are usually located so it may take a bit of contortion to route the cable if you have multiple drives. With a single drive I suspect it would be mounted in a higher bay, and probably wouldn’t be an issue. Now that I think of it though… The SATA ports are located right in the same area, and it took a bit of twisting around to get my big fingers to reach the port.

The ugly… The only ugly thing about this board can’t really be blamed on Asus, and that is some of the port locations (mentioned above) as well as the overall fit of the board. The true blame rests on the cramped style of Micro ATX computers, and even with a full tower it took a bit of maneuvering to get the board into the case, and the CPU sits right at the back of one of my hard drives. But like I said… You won’t find anything else these days any different… The Micro ATX standard is just what we have to work with at the moment.

Overall… The build was rather painless. The jumper less setup meant that once I had all my components connected the board was ready to go. The board even comes with a little thing called a Q-connector which simplifies the connection of the case wiring by allowing you to connect all the case wires to the clearly labeled Q-connector, and then simply plugging the whole thing onto the motherboard. The package includes an IDE cable, a FDD cable, 2 SATA cables, an SATA to Molex power adapter, and the driver CD.

Now… I made a little fuss about the IDE features on this board, and now I will tell you the reason for that. If you use a version of Windows XP that predates Service Pack 1 (I use the very first version of XP Home released) then you will be needing that IDE header. The reason is that Pre SP1 Windows did not support SATA drives, and I’ve read several reviews stating that this board will not support early versions of XP at all. That’s just not true. You just have to know what you are doing. In my case I used my IDE drive to load Windows, and my SATA drives to store my programs and data. The main thing is that once you have an early version of XP installed you need to install SP1 (or in my case I have SP2 on CD that I purchased from Microsoft) immediately before doing anything else. Afterward your SATA drives will function properly, and you can then load the driver CD that came with the board. Not really an issue if you do everything in the correct order, and it is something you will run into with any motherboard if you use an old version of XP. Another thing to keep in mind is that USB 2.0 drivers are not included with the board, so you will have to go to your device manager and will probably notice 2 devices with question marks by them. These are your USB 2.0 controllers. It’s just a simple matter of opening them and choosing to install the driver which the computer will download from Microsoft.

As far as performance. The board simply does what you’d expect it to do. My previous PC was an Intel Celeron D 2.93 Ghz on an Intel motherboard, and according to Passmark that CPU rated 338 while the AMD Athalon 64 X2 5200+ rated 1056, so in essence about 3 times faster than my previous model. I tested this by burning some DVDs. On the Celeron it took about 3 hours for Nero to trans code 2 and a half hours of video and burn it to DVD while the AMD took 1 hour to do the same task, so I’d say performance is exactly what was expected with a 3 X increase in overall speed.

A couple more things to keep in mind… One… This is a new board which means… You guessed it… They have switched memory yet again. Those DDR Dimms from your old board won’t work here. This board uses DDR2 Dual Channel DIMMS up to 1066 Mhz speed (I opted for 800Mhz since I wanted a module that was specifically listed in Asus’s compatibility chart just to be safe). Not really a big deal with memory prices being so low now. I paid $45 for 4 GB of Gskill 800 Mhz DDR2. Also you need to keep in mind that Windows 32 bit operating systems (be it XP, Vista, etc) do not recognize more than 4 GB of RAM. It doesn’t hurt to have more and Windows will use it, but it will not show the RAM in the system information. From what I understand if it recognizes more than 3 GB then consider yourself lucky and go on with life. In my case Windows recognized 3.25 GB so I’m satisfied, although I’ve read posts of people who haven’t been able to get more than 2.5 GB to show up, so I guess it depends on the system as to what windows will recognize, and I say again… According to Microsoft, Windows does use all the RAM even though it doesn’t show it all in the system info. If you have a 64 bit version of Windows then you should be able to recognize up to the full amount (I believe the board supports 8 GB max).

The last thing to mention is the Crossfire technology. I have read reviews and posts of people who don’t seem to understand how to get this to work. First of all you have to purchase an ATI Radeon card which is “Crossfire compatible” which means pretty much any of their newer cards. Older ATI cards do not support Crossfire, so please stop cluttering the internet with posts like “I can’t get my 5 year old ATI X1500 to work with Crossfire” Go buy a new card already. The other thing about Crossfire is you need to be running Windows Vista in order to use it. The drivers are not compatible with earlier versions of Windows.

So in essence I think you wouldn’t be able to do better for a motherboard in the $80 price range than the M3A78-EM Asus. Please also note that I haven’t even discussed the overclocking features of this board as I don’t overclock, so don’t have anything to say on the subject… When I want to go faster I just buy a faster CPU.