Asus M3A-H/HDMI

Verdict: Solid performance in some tests, but it's no overclocker.

The uninvitingly named Asus M3A-H/HDMI is a relatively unremarkable motherboard, which makes writing an opening sentence about it particularly difficult, so on that note, let's look at the hardware.

This is the cheapest Socket AM2+ motherboard we tested, and it doesn't have many features. The Northbridge and Southbridge have heatsinks but no heatpipes, and the VRMs are entirely lacking in cooling. It's also the only Socket AM2+ motherboard on test to have just one 16x PCI-E slot. However, the AMD 780G chipset's on-board ATI Radeon HD 3200 graphics support Hybrid CrossFire, which you can use if you're running Windows Vista.

The PCB layout is good, but is let down by the position of the 4-pin ATX12V power socket, which nestles annoyingly behind the Northbridge heatsink. The parallel EIDE connector is welcome, although a couple of S-ATA II ports in the same configuration would have been more useful. The Asus provides 12 USB 2 ports, a single FireWire port and six RAID-capable S-ATA II ports.

At its default BIOS settings, the Asus was the fastest AM2+ board in our image editing test with a score of 782, but its slower scores in the other benchmarks meant it had the slowest overall score of 823 points. The Asus was the fastest board when playing Crysis, although even with a GeForce 8800GTS, its minimum frame rate didn't rise above 20fps.

Overclocking the Asus was a thankless task. When applying a vcore of 1.45V and a 225MHz HTT to the AMD Phenom X4 9850 CPU, the capacitors on the motherboard started to pop. Although the Asus would boot into Windows, the vast majority of people would now be filling in an RMA form, so we decided to call it a day. Even if we had achieved more success with overclocking, we'd have been unable to push the HTT much further, as there's no option to change the CPU multiplier.

The Asus is a basic motherboard, and this is reflected in its low price. However, Asus seems to have cut corners in the quality of the components, in particular the capacitors. With strong scores in image editing and Crysis, and on-board graphics, this board isn't entirely without merit. However, if our review sample is anything to go by, it's one to avoid if you plan to overclock your Phenom.