The Asus M3A78 Pro is the second cheapest Socket AM2+ motherboard on test and cost just £66.95 when we went to press. At first glance, it appears to be a viable option if you're building a new PC on a tight budget.
As it's based on the AMD 780G chipset, the M3A78 Pro has both on-board graphics and a single 16x PCI-E 2.0 slot. The integrated Radeon HD 3200 GPU is useless for gaming, but should be sufficient for a media or work PC. There are also three PCI slots, plus a pair of 1x PCI-E slots. The six RAID-capable S-ATA II ports are more than enough for a budget PC, while the on-board 8-channel audio has both analogue outputs and a coaxial S/PDIF output. The PCB is well laid out too, although the VRMs are left to cool themselves with no dedicated heatsink.
The M3A78 Pro recorded the best score in our Media Benchmarks (900 points), and managed a minimum frame rate of 20fps in Crysis, making M3A78 Pro and the Foxconn A78AX-K the fastest boards on test. When we headed into the BIOS to overclock the M3A78 Pro, we were greeted with well laid out menus and a good array of overclocking options.
However, the voltages on offer are very limited. For example, the maximum available vcore is just 1.3V, so it's impossible to achieve a big overclock.
We managed to overclock the HTT to 220MHz with the HTT voltage increased to 1.3V and the chipset to 1.4V, which is the smallest overclock of all the Socket AM2+ motherboards in this Labs test. Due to the tiny vcore available, we could only increase the CPU frequency from 2.5GHz to 2.56GHz with an HTT speed of 205MHz at the default multiplier of 12.5. As a result, the overall Media Benchmarks score increased to just 941. Despite its poor overclocking credentials, the M3A78 Pro is polite - when you overclock it too far, it automatically recovers so that you don't have to clear the CMOS.
Despite its very low price and solid stock performance, the miniscule overclocking potential of the M3A78 Pro means that it isn't worth considering if you're building a new PC or looking for a new home for your Socket AM2+ processor.
Author: James Gorbold & Antony Leather
Asus M3A78 Pro