A Closer Look
The first thing I noticed when I picked up the box is how incredibly heavy it was. I’m thinking that this is an economy board, there couldn’t be a huge bundle to weigh the box down. After a little research I found that this board has Asus’ new “Stack Cool 3”. Stack Cool 2 has been around for a while, the difference is that the PCB has two ounces of copper sandwiched within, rather than the typical one ounce. This is the second motherboard I’ve had with this feature, the other was a Gigabyte board. This serves a few purposes, it adds rigidity to the board, it gives better grounding to the circuits, but mainly the extra copper helps wick heat away from the front of the board keeping the components cooler, adding longer life and stability to the board. Though it is only one extra ounce, it really makes the board feel heavy.
Asus used their black PCB for the M4A785TD-V EVO. It really highlights the different blue shades of the hardware, especially the NB and power supply heatsinks. The NB heatsink really looks sharp with its metallic blue EVO outer fin. It sports a chrome Asus logo.
Behind the CPU socket is a long line of high conductive polymer capacitors and a massive group of ferrite coils, all hoping to catch a little wind from the exhaust of the CPU cooler. Above the socket is a group of MOSFETs, Asus “8+2 phase” CPU voltage regulation. You see motherboards advertise this, usually 4-phase or 6-phase. Each phase “smoothes out” the power going to the CPU, the more the better, providing stable, clean power to the CPU to add life and aid overclocking. Overclocking requires clean stable power, and this board definitely should provide that.
The motherboard’s power supply heatsink follows the EVO design, and definitely looks sharp.
AM3 motherboards will accommodate AM3 processors only. AMD AM3 CPUs will work on AM2+ boards, but AM2+ processors will not fit AM3 sockets due to an extra two pins on the AM2+ processor. For whatever reason, Tom’s Hardware tried removing the two offending pins from an AM2+ processor to see if it would work on an AM3 motherboard, but it would not.
The AMD 785 chipset sports the ATI 4200 integrated graphics. It supports DX10.1, and you actually can game on it, of course at lowered settings. Like other 7 series AMD boards with integrated graphics, it has 128 megs of memory. Yeah, I know, most enthusiasts shun integrated graphics, but with a video card installed, you don’t even know it is there. It is actually nice if you need to build a system but don’t quite have enough cash, or you are undecided on a video card.
The M4A785TD-V EVO has two PCI-E x 16 slots, one running at x16 and one at x4, as supported by the 785G chipset. The motherboard supports CrossfireX. The two slots are nicely separated, many boards I’ve had the slots are so close together that it is hard to use cards with 2-slot cooling due to protruding screws on the back of the bottom card.
Both slots support ATI Hybrid Graphics, but the best I can determine, the only graphics cards that can be used with the 785G in Hybrid Graphics is the HD 3450 and HD 3470, low end mainstream cards. I could be mistaken, but looking at AMD’s site, that’s what it looks like. If you didn’t know, ATI Hybrid Graphics in a nutshell is the integrated graphics and a video card (called “discrete GPU” by ATI) running together in Crossfire, giving the video card a boost, actually considering the two above video cards X2s.
Also included is a PCI-E x1 slot, and three conventional PCI slots. Of note, the board has a COM1 port nestled between the PCI slots. Most people won’t use this, but I have a couple of devices that require use of a COM1, and motherboards that will accommodate them are getting fewer and fewer.
Looking around the board, it is set up pretty well for cable management, most connectors are around the perimeter, with two exceptions. The aforementioned COM1 port, which few will use, and the IDE port, which some will use. Note that there are three internal USB connectors, allowing for six more USB ports, either chassis or via expansion ports. (not included)
If you will notice, there is no Floppy port on this board. I noticed when I opened the box that there wasn’t a floppy ribbon cable included in the bundle, and had to check why. If I’m not mistaken, this is the first motherboard that I’ve owned without one. Personally, I see no need for one, there is no real reason to use this archaic device anymore…if there are any new motherboards out there that don’t support updating the BIOS with a thumb drive and in the Windows environment, they aren’t worth owning. You can buy a thumb drive for around 5 bucks that will hold data equaling more than 10 boxes of 3.5 disks. Actually I have a friend that still uses them. I laugh in his face every time I see him pull out a floppy disk, and usually make some comment about Fred Flintstone or Barney Rubble.
Same as with requiring use of a floppy to install RAID drivers. The IDE connector will be the next to go…I do have one older optical drive with IDE connector that I still use, but as cheap as they are, it wouldn’t be a big deal. Actually the drive has spent much more time over the past five years collecting dust than it has being installed in a rig.
The SB cooler follows Asus’ EVO theme, both in design and color.
The board has five internal SATA ports, supporting RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 10 and JBOD. The 785G chipset does not support RAID 5.
The M4A785TD-V EVO supports up to 16 gigs of DDR3-1800 memory. Any speed over DDR3-1333 requires overclocking of the CPU. We’ll see how much overclocking flexibility the board has to attain that speed in a bit.
The I/O panel is very complete considering this is an economy motherboard. The PS/2 port is combination mouse/keyboard, which is pretty cool if you still use either, but I guess unfortunate if you use both. I said that the IDE connector will be the next thing to go on motherboards, but it also could be the PS/2 ports, I’ve already had a couple of motherboards without them. There are six USB ports, an IEEE 1394, optical S/PDIF, a single LAN port, and HD Audio. eSATA and HDMI are very nice additions, and make the M4A785TD-V EVO ideal for use in an HTPC rig. The DVI port can be used in conjunction with a video card for multiple screen applications.
Not much of a bundle here, but that’s the whole purpose of an economy board, few extras to jack up the price. The SATA cables are nicer than those supplied by Asus in the past, with 90 degree connectors on one end, and they are black rather than the red ones that Asus usually has.
