Asus M4A785TD-V EVO 785G ATX Preview

 

At an approximate retail price of £70, this motherboard has a lot of competition. From the Socket AM2+ side, it is possible to purchase AMD 790GX based motherboards such as the Biostar TA790GX series with a slightly better feature set and from the Socket AM3 side, a number of hybrid AMD 770 or 790X motherboards also paired with the SB750 southbridge such as the Gigabyte MA770T UD3P. It’s safe to say that the Asus M4A785TD-V EVO deviates from it’s more mainstream routes and holds it’s own against the aforementioned motherboards and only lacks a small number of features such as 8x/8x CrossfireX support. What it does have over other AMD chipsets is a more capable Integrated Graphics chipset which can now play 7.1 channel sound over HDMI (previously 5.1) and also supports DX10.1 (previously DX10). Also mentioned previously, the HD 4200 is expected to overclock very well and can be paired in hybrid crossfire with a HD 43xx series graphics card, resulting in significant gains. Unfortunately, the substantial fly in the ointment for us was that we did not get the opportunity to really put the chipset through it’s paces. However, if the dedicated Radeon HD 3450 graphics card is anything to go by, it should be a very promising little GPU, especially with it’s GDDR3 Sideport memory running at an impressive 1333MHz frequency.

 

All in all, Asus have done a very good job at serving a mainstream chipset platform to those with higher performance requirements, thanks to a well thought out ATX base, Socket AM3 support, 16x/4x CrossfireX and at any rate, it’s certainly worth considering for those that are contemplating a middle of the road AMD Phenom II setup.

 

 

– Well thought board layout.

– Express Gate OS is an excellent touch.

– Comprehensive BIOS.

– Overclocks Reasonably well.

– Slightly lacking in accessories.

 

– Nothing.