Hello people!!
After gap of few weeks, I am back with yet another motherboard review. This time I will be reviewing a mainstream socket AM2+ motherboard, the ASUS M3N78-EH. This motherboard is targeted towards buyers who want no frills, simple, stable motherboard with decent feature set. Lets have a look at the board in detail.
[BREAK=The chipset and the board]
This motherboard is based on the Nvidia nForce 8200 chipset. The 8200 chipset from Nvidia is a single chip solution which brings Hybrid SLI to the AMD CPUs. It supports all AMD AM2 and AM2+ CPUs upto 5200MT/s.
ASUS advertises this board as a board supporting upto only 95watt CPUs. This basically rules out any processors above the Phenom x4 9550. But I had Phenom x4 9750 with me and I decided to see if this motherboard will work with this CPU, and it did without any hiccups.
The board came in a nice simple, medium size box.
Lets quickly go through the motherboard specifications.
[BREAK=Specifications]
Specifications
CPU
AMD Socket AM2+ / AM2 Processors
AMD Phenomâ„¢/Athlon64/Sempron processors
AMD Cool 'n' Quietâ„¢ Technology
AMD64 architecture enables simultaneous 32-bit and 64-bit computing
AMD Live!â„¢ Ready
*Support CPU up to 95W
Chipset
NVIDIA GeForce 8200
System Bus
Up to 5200/MT/s HyperTransportâ„¢ 3.0 interface for AM2+ CPU
2000/1600 MT/s for AM2 CPU
Memory
4 x240-pin DIMM, Max. 8 GB, DDR2 1066/800/667/533 ECC,Non-ECC,Un-buffered Memory
Dual Channel memory architecture
*DDR2 1066 is supported by AM2+ CPU only
**Refer to ASUSTeK Computer or user manual for Memory QVL (Qualify Vendor List)
***When installing total memory of 4GB capacity or more, Windows® 32-bit operation system may only recognize less than 3GB. Hence, a total installed memory of less than 3GB is recommended.
Expansion Slots
1 x PCIe x16
2 x PCIe x1
3 x PCI
Scalable Link Interface (SLIâ„¢)
Support NVIDIA Hybrid SLI-Ready graphics cards
*Reter to ASUSTeK Computer for the discrete graphics GPU QVL list which supports the Hybrid SLI technology.
** Hybrid SLI function requires nVidia Hybrid SLI driver. Currently nVidia's driver is not ready. Please check support.asus.com for the lastest driver release.
Storage
Southbridge
1 xUltraDMA 133/100
6 xSATA 3 Gb/s ports
Support RAID 0,1,5,10,JBOD
LAN
Phy Gigabit LAN
Audio
Realtek® ALC883 8 -Channel High Definition Audio CODEC
Supports Anti Pop Funtion and Vista Premium
Supports S/PDIF out interface, Jack-detect
USB
12 USB 2.0 ports (4 ports at back panel, 8 ports at mid-board)
Overclocking Features
SFS (Stepless Frequency Selection)
- FSB tuning from 200MHz to 300MHz at 1MHz increment
Overclocking Protection
- ASUS C.P.R.(CPU Parameter Recall)
Special Features
ASUS MyLogo 2
ASUS EZ Flash 2
ASUS CrashFree BIOS 3
ASUS Q-Fan
Back Panel I/O Ports
1 x Parallel
1 x PS/2 Keyboard
1 x PS/2 Mouse
1 x LAN(RJ45) port
4 x USB 2.0/1.1
1 x COM port
8 -Channel Audio I/O
Internal I/O Connectors
4 x USB connectors supports additional 8 USB 2.0 ports
1 x Floppy disk drive connector
1 x IDE connector
6 x SATA connectors
1 x CPU Fan connector
1 x Chassis Fan connector
1 x S/PDIF Out connector
1 x4-pin ATX 12V Power connector
1 x 24-pin EATX Power connector
4 pin internal speaker,match with F_PANEL
Front panel audio connector
CD audio in
System Panel
BIOS
8 Mb Flash ROM
DMI 2.0
AMI BIOS
PnP
WfM 2.0
SM BIOS 2.5
ACPI 2.0a
Manageability
WfM 2.0,DMI 2.0,WOL/WOR by PME,WOR by Ring, PME Wake Up
O/S Compatibility
Windows Vista
Windows XP
Accessories
User's manual
1 x I/O Shield
1 x UltraDMA 133/100/66 cable
1 x Floppy disk drive cable
2 x SATA cable
1 x 2-port SATA power cable
Support Disc
Drivers
ASUS PC Probe II
Anti-virus software (OEM version)
ASUS LiveUpdate Utility
Form Factor
ATX Form Factor
12 inch x 9.3 inch ( 30.5 cm x 23.6 cm )
Lets move onto the motherboard itself.
[BREAK=Motherboard layout]
Motherboard Layout
The motherboard layout is very clean. And as this board is single chip solution which means there is no southbridge on this board, its very clean and simple. The CPU socket area is clutter free.
The northbridge heatsink is small and far away from both CPU socket and PCI express slot. This means installing even monster heatsinks should not be a problem on this motherboard.
The slot placement is nice and clean. You wont loose any PCI slots even if you are using dual slot GPU. All three PCI slots will be available for use.
The RAM slots are located next to the ATX power connector and again the placement is perfect. The bottom end of the RAM slots does not come anywhere near the PCI express slots. So removing and installing the RAM sticks even with the GPU installed is not an issue.
SATA ports are located just below the ATX power connector and even here the placement is such that nothing can obstruct or render any SATA port useless.
CPU socket area is also not cluttered, making heatsink installation that much more easy.
IDE connector might create a small problem if you have big dual slot GPU installed in your system. In such case to remove or attach IDE cable will mean you have to remove GPU as well.
Other than this, the board layout is absolutely flawless. This is one of the cleanest board I have ever used.
The backplate area has HD Audio, Gigabit LAN, 4 USB ports, 2 PS2 ports for keyboard/mouse and in addition to this, legacy serial and parallel ports as well. This board will make a good solution for SOHO users who still use old dot matrix printers and fax modems needing serial / parallel ports.
Here is the picture with the Phenom 9750 installed.
The bundle is very basic. Manual, CDs, I/O shield and sata / IDE cables are included.
Here are few pics with the big Xigmatek HDT Achilles 1284 installed on the board.
Lets move onto the board bios.
[BREAK=Bios]
Bios
Now one must understand, this is not the overclocker’s board. So the overclocking options are very limited. You don’t even get the basic vcore options for the Phenom. Only memory voltage and FSB options are there. Below are the screens of this board’s bios. They are self explanatory.
[BREAK=Test setup and How we tested]
Test setup and How we tested
Test Setup
CPU: AMD Phenom x4 9750
RAM: Transcend DDR2 800
GPU: ATI Radeon HD4870
HDD: Seagate 7200.11 500GB SATA II
PSU: Cooler Master Real Power Pro 550W
DVD ROM: Samsung S223 SATA
OS: Windows Vista Ultimate X64
How we Tested.
To begin with, I used a clean install of Windows Vista X64 SP1. Latest drivers for motherboard were downloaded directly from Nvidia as the drivers that came with the motherboard were totally outdated.
We ran usual set of synthetic and real world gaming / performance benchmarks to assess the performance.
[BREAK=Everest Ultimate Edition CPU benchmarks]
Everest Ultimate Edition CPU benchmarks.
Everest is comprehensive system benchmarking, information and monitoring suit. Though the benchmark suit is purely synthetic in nature, it has lots of reference systems in its database to compare your system against. And give an idea of relative performance of the system.
Here are the screenshots of the CPU performance.
You can see the scores are on par when compared to other AMD Phenom system. The scores are comparable with the XFX Geforce 8300 motherboard I tested a while ago which should not be a surprise as most AMD platforms performs similar to each other.
[BREAK=Everest Ultimate Edition Memory Benchmarks]
Everest Ultimate Edition Memory benchmarks
This is again a synthetic benchmark which gives us the memory bandwidth numbers.
Let’s have a look.
As you can again see the memory benchmark results are not that great but comparable to other Phenom system.
[BREAK=3DMARK Vantage]
3DMark Vantage
3DMark Vantage is again a synthetic 3D benchmark. Though this is not an ideal 3D benchmark, it gives a idea about the overall GPU and CPU performance.
The GPU score for these clock speeds is lower by almost 800-900points on this board compared to intel counterparts. The CPU score is very good for stock Phenom x4.
[BREAK=World In Conflict]
World In Conflict
World in conflict is one of the best strategy games that came out recently. The graphics and gameplay both are absolutely stunning, and its one of the games that is really CPU and GPU intensive.
We used game’s in build benchmark system. For this test, the graphics setting were set to very high in the game. This enables DX10 render path and also enables 4x AA.
1680x1050 Very High DX10
Min: 10
Max: 67
Avg: 27
This game heavily favours Intel C2D architecture, so just 26FPS with HD4870 in system didn’t exactly came as surprise.
[BREAK=Crysis]
Crysis
Oh yes, the ever so debated game out there. Many people call it badly coded game, many curse it for being just a technological demonstration. But surely, no review will can ignore or eliminate this game from their gaming tests
So let’s have a look at 1680x1050 Very High DX10 numbers with gpu slightly overclocked.
The performance is good enough here for AMD system.
[BREAK=HDTach 3.0.4]
HDTach 3.0.4
HDTach is a test tool to measure the HDD performance. This should give us an idea about the HDD performance of the motherboard and chipset.
As you can see, the results are again very good and on par with Intel P4x series.
[BREAK=Overclocking]
Overclocking.
This board lacks the voltage options you will see on enthusiast board. The board is targeted at mainstream and it clearly shows when you see the bios options.
But still I tried to clock the Phenom on this board. Anything above 220Mhz FSB and CPU will start throttling even when C&Q is disabled. This is more of a motherboard limitation than the CPU as from previous experience, even with stock voltage, the CPU can do more. So atleast with Quad core Phenom, you wont get too far when it comes to overclocking.
[BREAK=Final Thoughts]
Final Thoughts.
This board is a mixed bag. Its not expensive, its full ATX, has 6 SATA ports, IDE support, PCI Express 2.0 X16 slot, PCI express x1 slots, 3 PCI slots, Gigabit LAN, 4 Ram slots, 12 USB ports, support for most AM2/AM2+ CPUs, good layout and low cost seems like a very potent combination. But at the same time, it is a basic board and not for enthusiast.
This should prove to be much better board when coupled with AMD x2 cpus. But with Phenom x4, the board is seriously limited when it comes to overclocking due to lack of bios options to do anything.
Performance is as expected for AMD platform.
There are not too many bad things I can say about this board other than overclocking. But at the same time, I cant say too many good things about it either. This is in itself an indication of a decent midbudget product. I might as well call it a boaring product. And it is. But it gets the job done. And that’s what will matter most to the targeted audience which is looking for no frills motherboard.
I would give it 3.5 out of 5. And it lost out from near perfect score only because of the bios and overclocking.
Indicative pricing : Rs.5450-5500 in Mumbai.
Pros
• Good layout
• Decent performance
• Not too expensive
• Lots of expansion slots and ports
Cons
• Poor bios for overclocking
• Has slight cheap feel to it. No solid capacitors.
Special thanks to ASUS and Rashi Peripherals Pvt. LTD. for supplying this board for the review.
Shripad signing out.
After gap of few weeks, I am back with yet another motherboard review. This time I will be reviewing a mainstream socket AM2+ motherboard, the ASUS M3N78-EH. This motherboard is targeted towards buyers who want no frills, simple, stable motherboard with decent feature set. Lets have a look at the board in detail.
[BREAK=The chipset and the board]
This motherboard is based on the Nvidia nForce 8200 chipset. The 8200 chipset from Nvidia is a single chip solution which brings Hybrid SLI to the AMD CPUs. It supports all AMD AM2 and AM2+ CPUs upto 5200MT/s.
ASUS advertises this board as a board supporting upto only 95watt CPUs. This basically rules out any processors above the Phenom x4 9550. But I had Phenom x4 9750 with me and I decided to see if this motherboard will work with this CPU, and it did without any hiccups.
The board came in a nice simple, medium size box.
Lets quickly go through the motherboard specifications.
[BREAK=Specifications]
Specifications
CPU
AMD Socket AM2+ / AM2 Processors
AMD Phenomâ„¢/Athlon64/Sempron processors
AMD Cool 'n' Quietâ„¢ Technology
AMD64 architecture enables simultaneous 32-bit and 64-bit computing
AMD Live!â„¢ Ready
*Support CPU up to 95W
Chipset
NVIDIA GeForce 8200
System Bus
Up to 5200/MT/s HyperTransportâ„¢ 3.0 interface for AM2+ CPU
2000/1600 MT/s for AM2 CPU
Memory
4 x240-pin DIMM, Max. 8 GB, DDR2 1066/800/667/533 ECC,Non-ECC,Un-buffered Memory
Dual Channel memory architecture
*DDR2 1066 is supported by AM2+ CPU only
**Refer to ASUSTeK Computer or user manual for Memory QVL (Qualify Vendor List)
***When installing total memory of 4GB capacity or more, Windows® 32-bit operation system may only recognize less than 3GB. Hence, a total installed memory of less than 3GB is recommended.
Expansion Slots
1 x PCIe x16
2 x PCIe x1
3 x PCI
Scalable Link Interface (SLIâ„¢)
Support NVIDIA Hybrid SLI-Ready graphics cards
*Reter to ASUSTeK Computer for the discrete graphics GPU QVL list which supports the Hybrid SLI technology.
** Hybrid SLI function requires nVidia Hybrid SLI driver. Currently nVidia's driver is not ready. Please check support.asus.com for the lastest driver release.
Storage
Southbridge
1 xUltraDMA 133/100
6 xSATA 3 Gb/s ports
Support RAID 0,1,5,10,JBOD
LAN
Phy Gigabit LAN
Audio
Realtek® ALC883 8 -Channel High Definition Audio CODEC
Supports Anti Pop Funtion and Vista Premium
Supports S/PDIF out interface, Jack-detect
USB
12 USB 2.0 ports (4 ports at back panel, 8 ports at mid-board)
Overclocking Features
SFS (Stepless Frequency Selection)
- FSB tuning from 200MHz to 300MHz at 1MHz increment
Overclocking Protection
- ASUS C.P.R.(CPU Parameter Recall)
Special Features
ASUS MyLogo 2
ASUS EZ Flash 2
ASUS CrashFree BIOS 3
ASUS Q-Fan
Back Panel I/O Ports
1 x Parallel
1 x PS/2 Keyboard
1 x PS/2 Mouse
1 x LAN(RJ45) port
4 x USB 2.0/1.1
1 x COM port
8 -Channel Audio I/O
Internal I/O Connectors
4 x USB connectors supports additional 8 USB 2.0 ports
1 x Floppy disk drive connector
1 x IDE connector
6 x SATA connectors
1 x CPU Fan connector
1 x Chassis Fan connector
1 x S/PDIF Out connector
1 x4-pin ATX 12V Power connector
1 x 24-pin EATX Power connector
4 pin internal speaker,match with F_PANEL
Front panel audio connector
CD audio in
System Panel
BIOS
8 Mb Flash ROM
DMI 2.0
AMI BIOS
PnP
WfM 2.0
SM BIOS 2.5
ACPI 2.0a
Manageability
WfM 2.0,DMI 2.0,WOL/WOR by PME,WOR by Ring, PME Wake Up
O/S Compatibility
Windows Vista
Windows XP
Accessories
User's manual
1 x I/O Shield
1 x UltraDMA 133/100/66 cable
1 x Floppy disk drive cable
2 x SATA cable
1 x 2-port SATA power cable
Support Disc
Drivers
ASUS PC Probe II
Anti-virus software (OEM version)
ASUS LiveUpdate Utility
Form Factor
ATX Form Factor
12 inch x 9.3 inch ( 30.5 cm x 23.6 cm )
Lets move onto the motherboard itself.
[BREAK=Motherboard layout]
Motherboard Layout
The motherboard layout is very clean. And as this board is single chip solution which means there is no southbridge on this board, its very clean and simple. The CPU socket area is clutter free.
The northbridge heatsink is small and far away from both CPU socket and PCI express slot. This means installing even monster heatsinks should not be a problem on this motherboard.
The slot placement is nice and clean. You wont loose any PCI slots even if you are using dual slot GPU. All three PCI slots will be available for use.
The RAM slots are located next to the ATX power connector and again the placement is perfect. The bottom end of the RAM slots does not come anywhere near the PCI express slots. So removing and installing the RAM sticks even with the GPU installed is not an issue.
SATA ports are located just below the ATX power connector and even here the placement is such that nothing can obstruct or render any SATA port useless.
CPU socket area is also not cluttered, making heatsink installation that much more easy.
IDE connector might create a small problem if you have big dual slot GPU installed in your system. In such case to remove or attach IDE cable will mean you have to remove GPU as well.
Other than this, the board layout is absolutely flawless. This is one of the cleanest board I have ever used.
The backplate area has HD Audio, Gigabit LAN, 4 USB ports, 2 PS2 ports for keyboard/mouse and in addition to this, legacy serial and parallel ports as well. This board will make a good solution for SOHO users who still use old dot matrix printers and fax modems needing serial / parallel ports.
Here is the picture with the Phenom 9750 installed.
The bundle is very basic. Manual, CDs, I/O shield and sata / IDE cables are included.
Here are few pics with the big Xigmatek HDT Achilles 1284 installed on the board.
Lets move onto the board bios.
[BREAK=Bios]
Bios
Now one must understand, this is not the overclocker’s board. So the overclocking options are very limited. You don’t even get the basic vcore options for the Phenom. Only memory voltage and FSB options are there. Below are the screens of this board’s bios. They are self explanatory.
[BREAK=Test setup and How we tested]
Test setup and How we tested
Test Setup
CPU: AMD Phenom x4 9750
RAM: Transcend DDR2 800
GPU: ATI Radeon HD4870
HDD: Seagate 7200.11 500GB SATA II
PSU: Cooler Master Real Power Pro 550W
DVD ROM: Samsung S223 SATA
OS: Windows Vista Ultimate X64
How we Tested.
To begin with, I used a clean install of Windows Vista X64 SP1. Latest drivers for motherboard were downloaded directly from Nvidia as the drivers that came with the motherboard were totally outdated.
We ran usual set of synthetic and real world gaming / performance benchmarks to assess the performance.
[BREAK=Everest Ultimate Edition CPU benchmarks]
Everest Ultimate Edition CPU benchmarks.
Everest is comprehensive system benchmarking, information and monitoring suit. Though the benchmark suit is purely synthetic in nature, it has lots of reference systems in its database to compare your system against. And give an idea of relative performance of the system.
Here are the screenshots of the CPU performance.
You can see the scores are on par when compared to other AMD Phenom system. The scores are comparable with the XFX Geforce 8300 motherboard I tested a while ago which should not be a surprise as most AMD platforms performs similar to each other.
[BREAK=Everest Ultimate Edition Memory Benchmarks]
Everest Ultimate Edition Memory benchmarks
This is again a synthetic benchmark which gives us the memory bandwidth numbers.
Let’s have a look.
As you can again see the memory benchmark results are not that great but comparable to other Phenom system.
[BREAK=3DMARK Vantage]
3DMark Vantage
3DMark Vantage is again a synthetic 3D benchmark. Though this is not an ideal 3D benchmark, it gives a idea about the overall GPU and CPU performance.
The GPU score for these clock speeds is lower by almost 800-900points on this board compared to intel counterparts. The CPU score is very good for stock Phenom x4.
[BREAK=World In Conflict]
World In Conflict
World in conflict is one of the best strategy games that came out recently. The graphics and gameplay both are absolutely stunning, and its one of the games that is really CPU and GPU intensive.
We used game’s in build benchmark system. For this test, the graphics setting were set to very high in the game. This enables DX10 render path and also enables 4x AA.
1680x1050 Very High DX10
Min: 10
Max: 67
Avg: 27
This game heavily favours Intel C2D architecture, so just 26FPS with HD4870 in system didn’t exactly came as surprise.
[BREAK=Crysis]
Crysis
Oh yes, the ever so debated game out there. Many people call it badly coded game, many curse it for being just a technological demonstration. But surely, no review will can ignore or eliminate this game from their gaming tests
So let’s have a look at 1680x1050 Very High DX10 numbers with gpu slightly overclocked.
The performance is good enough here for AMD system.
[BREAK=HDTach 3.0.4]
HDTach 3.0.4
HDTach is a test tool to measure the HDD performance. This should give us an idea about the HDD performance of the motherboard and chipset.
As you can see, the results are again very good and on par with Intel P4x series.
[BREAK=Overclocking]
Overclocking.
This board lacks the voltage options you will see on enthusiast board. The board is targeted at mainstream and it clearly shows when you see the bios options.
But still I tried to clock the Phenom on this board. Anything above 220Mhz FSB and CPU will start throttling even when C&Q is disabled. This is more of a motherboard limitation than the CPU as from previous experience, even with stock voltage, the CPU can do more. So atleast with Quad core Phenom, you wont get too far when it comes to overclocking.
[BREAK=Final Thoughts]
Final Thoughts.
This board is a mixed bag. Its not expensive, its full ATX, has 6 SATA ports, IDE support, PCI Express 2.0 X16 slot, PCI express x1 slots, 3 PCI slots, Gigabit LAN, 4 Ram slots, 12 USB ports, support for most AM2/AM2+ CPUs, good layout and low cost seems like a very potent combination. But at the same time, it is a basic board and not for enthusiast.
This should prove to be much better board when coupled with AMD x2 cpus. But with Phenom x4, the board is seriously limited when it comes to overclocking due to lack of bios options to do anything.
Performance is as expected for AMD platform.
There are not too many bad things I can say about this board other than overclocking. But at the same time, I cant say too many good things about it either. This is in itself an indication of a decent midbudget product. I might as well call it a boaring product. And it is. But it gets the job done. And that’s what will matter most to the targeted audience which is looking for no frills motherboard.
I would give it 3.5 out of 5. And it lost out from near perfect score only because of the bios and overclocking.
Indicative pricing : Rs.5450-5500 in Mumbai.
Pros
• Good layout
• Decent performance
• Not too expensive
• Lots of expansion slots and ports
Cons
• Poor bios for overclocking
• Has slight cheap feel to it. No solid capacitors.
Special thanks to ASUS and Rashi Peripherals Pvt. LTD. for supplying this board for the review.
Shripad signing out.
, and it looks empty.
