Asus M3A78-EMH HDMI Motherboard Review

Testing Results

We took the Asus M3A78-EMH HDMI and paired it against the flagship chipset, the 790FX, on the Asus M3A32-MVP Deluxe, to see how it stacked up against the best that is available. Lets take a look at the results and see how it fared.

Looking at the results, it is clear that the 780G chipset really is no match for the 790FX. The 790FX bests the 780G in every benchmark test that was run. The three tests that the 780G did win were actually so close that it is hard to call it a win.

There are some interesting things to note about the results outside of the fact that the 790FX dominated. For one, if you look at the WinRAR encoding scores it is apparent that something is amiss. Also, we see the same type of situation with the Crysis and FEAR scores. Something was just wrong here. We tried different ram. We tried our Phenom 9900 CPU on the board as well and we had the same issues with the low scores on just these few tests. We then put in our AMD 5000+ CPU and booted the system up. Low and behold, all was good and we got normal scores again.

The only conclusion that I can come to is that there is either a BIOS issue or some type of power issue with the board that only shows up when using a Phenom CPU. Do I blame Asus or AMD? Well, this is not the first time we have had issues with the Phenom CPU, so you come to your own conclusion.

I can say that even though we saw these low scores with the Phenom CPUs, we did not experience any trouble outside of the benchmarking. The board seemed to run fine in normal tasks.