Asus M4A785TD-V Evo review

Manufacturer: Asus
UK Price (as Reviewed): £69.24 (inc. VAT)
US Price (as Reviewed): N/A

How about something a little different: full-size ATX motherboard with integrated graphics? The Asus M4A785TD-V Evo, with its brown PCB and shades of pastel blue looks like a watercolour painting exploded in the factory. That's not a bad thing: the subtle tones
are actually a nice change from the EVERYTHING MUST BE BLACK theme that so many motherboard makers opt for these days.

The Evo can be bought in both ATX and micro ATX flavours, and features AMD's new 785G chipset - which features a Radeon HD 4200 with 40 stream processors and DX 10.1 support.The 128MB Sideport memory is used as a small framebuffer for 3D applications that eases up the need for main memory slightly. Previously we've found that in most games it's insufficient for any real benefit, but you can check the gaming pages to see how it works with the 785G.

In the box there's a mix of four SATA cables, two of which have 90 degree connectors, Asus Q-connectors and the usual IDE cable, driver disk, manual and metal rear I/O shield.

Features List

• Support for socket 938 AM3 CPUs including Phenom II and Athlon II series.
  
• AMD 785G northbridge
  
• AMD SB710 southbridge
  
• Four 240-pin DDR3 memory slots supporting 1,066 and 1,333MHz DIMMs, with DDR3 1600/1800(O.C.) overclocking support for up to 16GB in total
  
• Radeon HD 4200 Integrated Graphics with HDMI 1.3 support and 128MB DDR3 sideport memory
  
• One PCI-Express 2.0 x16 slots with Hybrid CrossFire support
  
• One PCI-Express 2.0 x4 slot (x16 physical)
  
• One PCI-Express 2.0 x1 slot
  
• Three PCI slots
  
• VIA VT1708S 7.1 channel high-definition audio codec
  
• One Realtek RTL8112L PCI-Express Gigabit LAN
  
• Five SATA 3Gbps and one eSATA 3Gbps ports from SB710 supporting RAID 0, 1, 0+1 and JBOD
  
• One IDE port
  
• Twelve USB 2.0 ports (six rear I/O, six pin-outs)