Asus M3A78-CM Motherboard Review

I’ve built several computers over the past 10 years or so, and despite the fact that so many people rave about Asus, I’m sold on MSI, ECS, and even one real economy build using Jetway. All that changed with my Asus M3A78-CM motherboard. I used all the motherboards, except for one faulty board, all worked very well and met my expectations. Well, I just did another economy build and build a new computer for under $400. At first everything was reaching the $500 mark from the case of prices, but by the time I finished some clever shopping, I finished a new dual core, quickly and yet remarkably upgradable computer The best part of this new computer is its solid performance and stability.

I’m not into overclocking, although I did this just to test what the computer can do, but I did this economy build containing an AMD Athlon 64 X2, 2 GB of Ram, and a mid-range tower. The computer is fast enough to encode the CD format video to MPEG 4 or DIVX at 120-140 frames per second, which is 4 times the viewing rate. I will break a 2 hour movie into 30 minutes. With the Asus M3A78-CM motherboard I was able to quickly and easily overclock the BIOS and test this computer to a 10% increase, but then restore it to normal.

One of my key issues with building my budget computer was to have the perfect product that would allow me to upgrade. in a year or two. The Asus M3A78-CM motherboard gives me the ability. I went to save money with an old hard drive from an old computer, but everything else was bought. Conservatively priced, but leaving room for growth, the Asus M3A78-CM motherboard was the most expensive part of the build at $75 from Newegg. With this case I bought for $30, a 430 Watt for $40, AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200+ for under $60, (dollar per peformance AMD is still tops, but I need to make a breakthrough or be lost in the dust), 2 Gb RAM, and double layer DVD burner. The total cost was about $256 + $80 for the LCD monitor from Tiger Direct, plus shipping.

The Asus M3A78-CM Micro ATX motherboard leaves me room to increase my RAM to 8Gb, the AM2+ socket will allow me to more than double my workload, dropping in the AMD Phenom 9950 Quad Core when the prices come down a bit. The motherboard also has 1 IDE connector for up to 2 ide drives and 6 SATA connectors for extra storage space. Although this motherboard is micro ATX, it has 2 PCI slots, 1 PCI X1 and 1 PCI X16. First of all, I use the onboard ATI Radeon HD3100 to save the cost of a video card, and I still use the computer quickly, we watch movies, and on the computer without a hiccup, and once I had everything installed, I left the computer running WinXP for a full week without rebooting it, in spite of crunching videos, surfing the web and doing some graphic work.

When building, I added a wifi card and a Magic Jack phone and saved about $70 per month on phone bills< /a> this new computer in 4 months in time it will pay for itself.

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