The ASUS M3A78-EMH HDMI

To test the prowess of AMD’s new chipset, we’ve received two motherboards, the ASUS M3A78-EMH HDMI and the Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H.

Both motherboards offer a nice array of display connectivity options, with VGA, DVI, and HDMI outputs all available on the backplane of the motherboard. The Gigabyte motherboard even ships with a S/PDIF audio output on the back plane as well. The ASUS board is currently selling for $90 on Newegg, while the GA-MA78GM-S2H sells for $100. We’ll start with the ASUS M3A78-EMH HDMI first.

ASUS M3A78-EMH HDMI

So far ASUS has announced three 780G motherboards, the M3A78-EH, the M3A-H/HDMI, and the M3A78-EMH HDMI. The M3A78-EMH HDMI is ASUS’ micro-ATX motherboard, while the other two boards are full-sized ATX boards.

The M3A78-EMH HDMI may be small in stature, but ASUS has outfitted the board with a nice array of features. As we mentioned above, display options include DVI, VGA, and HDMI, giving end users lots of flexibility when it comes to display outputs. One feature we were a little disappointed to see omitted from the boards we’re testing today is dual-link DVI, but if you can afford a 30” panel chances are you aren’t going to run it on an integrated graphics solution.


For expansion, ASUS outfits the M3A78-EMH HDMI with one PCI Express graphics slot, two PCI slots, and a single x1 PCIe slot. The motherboard supports ASUS’CPU Parameter Recall (CPR) technology, which will automatically load the BIOS in safe mode after an unsuccessful overclock. The board also supports ASUS CrashFree BIOS which allows you to restore corrupted BIOS as well as their Q-Fan technology which can be used to dynamically adjust fan speeds.

The BIOS interface

Unfortunately, the M3A78-EMH HDMI BIOS doesn’t support IGP overclocking. Despite the massive aluminum heatsink ASUS provides on the board, ASUS apparently doesn’t want you to dabble with IGP OC’ing. As you’ll see in our OC’ing results further down the page, this could be a major oversight in the current BIOS on ASUS’ part.

The rest of the board’s BIOS isn’t much better for overclockers. For instance, while ASUS does provide HyperTransport speeds for OC’ing the CPU, there aren’t any options in BIOS for adjusting voltages. Not even DRAM voltages could be adjusted in the 0043 BIOS we used for testing! This is a little concerning, as some enthusiast-oriented DDR2 modules need higher voltages to run successfully, but we didn’t run into any issues with the Corsair, Kingston, or OCZ modules we had available for testing.

Our guess is that ASUS assumes someone who buys a $90 motherboard isn’t going to pay extra for a higher-end memory module, and in all honesty this assumption is probably correct, but we still think a couple of voltage options for system RAM would be a good idea.


ASUS does provide HyperTransport speeds ranging from 200-300MHz in 1MHz increments. They also continue to provide their OC Profile settings which will automatically OC your CPU by 2, 5, 8, or up to 10% over the default clock speed (this is useful for newbies who may not want to fiddle with BIOS settings when OC’ing), but if you’re an enthusiast who wants to tweak every ounce of performance out of your CPU, and ultimately your entire system, the BIOS ASUS currently provides in the M3A78-EMH HDMI isn’t for you. It just isn’t built for OC’ers. This probably wouldn’t be such a bad thing, after all, considering the target market of the 780G chipset, its unlikely that many of these users will want to overclock an integrated platform, but after seeing the OC’ing results we got from the Gigabyte motherboard, we can’t help but wondering the full potential of the M3A78-EMH HDMI. Click over to the next page to see why we say this…