Well, I wanted a Phenom 9950. And that means I needed a board.

Honestly, the plan was to get the Asus M3A78-T or the Gigabyte MA790X-DS4. I spent an hour in Fry's looking at them, but then walked away when they sold out of (non-kicked-over) 9950s. So I decided "why settle" and went onto Newegg where I could see a much broader galaxy of choices. Unfortunately, without the loss-leader price of the 9950, my motherboard budget dropped precipitiously.

I wanted something basically analogous to a P35 board on the Intel side-- one x16 slot, no wasteful integrated graphics, but still a respectable, first-tier product.

The only chipset that even comes close on the AMD side is AMD 770.

The AMD 770 board selection is pretty anemic. You've got a lot of boards with the old SB600 southbridge. You've got boards which lack support for the 140-- and in some cases-- the 125 watt processors. And then you've got simply questionable products from fourth-tier manufacturers.

In the midst of all this, the M3A78 is just another compromise. It has the SB700 southbridge, but that's really all it has going for it. No FireWire, no eSATA sockets, no all-solid-capacitor build, few fan headers, not even 24+8 power (only 24+4). But it also lacks all those things I don't want-- integrated video from 780 boards, crossfire from 790 ones.

It's about $80, on the high-side for a 770 board. With the 9950 and postage, it came to $275.

The Package

The board is normal full-ATX size. This is slightly preferrable, IMO, to the "80% ATX" size some makers (Gigabyte :cough are doing-- it ensures solid bracers beneath the connectors Inside the box was the usual backplate, small collection of cables, manual, and driver disc. The board was wrapped in corrugated cardboard, and an anti-static bag, without even a foam pad beneath.

The manual had an insert telling me that they now only included one SATA cable, instead of the two promised. That's starting things on a good note.

Installation

The M3A78's layout is actually fairly decent, with excellent clearances around most ports. My primary objection is a poorly laid out IDE socket, which demands significant origami to hide its use. Small chipset heatsinks likely limit overclocking (but nobody expects overclocking from a Phenom anyway)

One weak spot was the way the CPU heatsink retainer was mounted. Their chosen angle does not allow the mounting of a heat-piped sink in a way that allows the airflow to exit the rear of the case. Some sinks (i. e. Zalman 9700) have ways around this, but it requires tweaking the sink to make it right.

Strangely, although the board has six SATA plugs, only four can be auto-detected in AHCI mode.

Running It

When you fire it up, it whines at you for not having the Express Gate (mini, fast-boot Linux package) installed on your hard disc. Of course it's not there, the machine has not been set up yet!

The BIOS is unusual in that it takes a surprisingly long time to load-- it systematically enumerates all the USB storage devices, so if you have a card-reader mounted in your front panel, it's gonna take a little while. It usually hides this behind a boot logo-- supposedly customizable. (Why can nobody make a BIOS which has an attractive boot screen, yet still tells you which drives and RAM are on board?)

While it allows you to do fan-speed control, it only works on 4-pin fans.

I noticed substantial performance benefits-- dramatic improvements in responsiveness during the first minute or so after boot-- by setting the hard disc into AHCI mode (for NCQ). My theory is that a four-core system, trying to load every startup app at once, thrashes the disc more at boot than a two-core one.

The default clock rate is closer to 200 than 201.

Driver/Software Issues

One nice thing: with a full AMD stack (chipset and GPU), installation is streamlined-- install the latest ATI Catalyst package, sound, LAN driver, and you're ready (aside from extra peripherals like TV cards)

The network card is detected by a default install of Vista SP1, but it fails to start up. You need later drivers.

The audio module-- a VIA setup-- has an annoying habit of popping up a little "welcome" dialogue on every boot.

Asus' temperature monitor software is both ugly and LOUD (playing noises when you click buttons). As an alternative, HWMonitor 1.09 works, although the voltages are all ove the show, and the temperatures are uncertain. 1.11 crashes.

The BIOS offers "EZ Flash 2" -- flash from the BIOS itself-- but I found it incapable of loading two different CDs, a floppy disc in a LS-120, and incapable of identifying a 128Mb SD card in a card reader. I finally gave up and installed the update through their Windows-based BIOS flasher. In comparison, Gigabyte's Q-Flash is butter-smooth.

Overall Conclusion

The board itself seems solid, but the gimmicks-- things like EZ Flash and smart-fan control-- feel unpolished. They're both things that the P35-DS3L this replaced did right a year ago.

I wonder if my expectations are just too high from expecting a $80 board to be as good as a $100 board. But it seems like the 770 has been utterly ignored-- nobody makes a true no-compromises board. Gigabyte's MA770-DS3 is probably the closest, but apparently some revisions are SB600-based and don't support 140w CPUs, so it's a crapshoot-- and nobody wants to gamble with a $180 CPU.

Surrounding Environment

Phenom 9950 (125w flavour), Radeon HD3650 (512M), Vista Ultimate/64 SP1, three PCI cards: Leadtek Winfast HDTV Cinema, generic FireWire 400 card, Marvell 8335-based 802.11g card.