ASRock M3A780GXH/128M Motherboard Review

By chris

Overclocking Results

Rather than see what the limits of what my CPU cooling was and try to break 4GHz on air, I decided to strictly test HTT overclocking. With Phenom II Black Edition processors HTT overclocking is useless when you can easily manipulate multipliers to achieve the clocks you desire. However, the budget CPUs have locked multipliers and stable HTT overclocking is required to push big clocks.

qASRock M3A780GXH 350MHz HTT Overclock

Overclocking this board reminded me of what life was like when I used to overclock budget processors and boards. You are constantly toeing that line of “is this safe?” all while reveling in how much performance you are unleashing. For $80, the M3A780GXH/128M surprised me with a 350MHz (75%) HTT overclock on air. At 350MHz HTT the board is 100% stable while 357MHz HTT resulted in BSOD while loading Windows. With 1.55vCore I had some concerns over the bare PWM mosfets overheating, but they held through multiple benchmarks. I would suggest aiming a fan over the PWM regardless of overclock, though; without any airflow they will roast.

ASRock M3A780GXH 360MHz HTT Overclock

ASRock M3A780GXH 26312 3DMark 2006

Sadly, going from 50C core temperatures to -70C core temperatures didn’t gain me much with HTT clocking. It more or less made 360MHz stable but anything past that was unstable. Worse yet, AMD Overdrive stopped functioning so I had to boot into Windows at 360MHz. I had a lot of issues getting the board to run dual-channel so this 3D06 run was done with a single 2GB stick of memory and 2 HD 4870×2 at 790/915.

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