ASRock M3A780GXH/128M Motherboard Review

Not much has changed with my AM3 test bed; however, I did mount fullcover waterblocks to my two HD 4870×2 graphic cards. Rather than separate the two cards for testing, I left them together and disabled the second card. Other than that everything is the same with Windows Vista Ultimate x64 SP2 being used and the latest versions of all the benching software being used (there are new 3DMark patches out, fyi). Memory was set to DDR3-1600 7-7-7-21-28-1T and the memory controller was set to 2GHz with unganged operation.

For the overclocking segment, on air vcore was set to 1.5v, vNB set to 1.3v, and vHTT set to 1.35v, and everything else was left as is. For the extreme overclocking session vcore was set to 1.57v, vNB set to 1.4v, and vHTT set to 1.35v. For cooling during the extreme overclocking session my mini cascade was utilized which holds 250w @ -70 Celsius and achieves CPU temperatures seen using dry ice.