Overclocking

The core unlocking feature of the Asus M4A785TD-V Evo motherboard proved to work very well as our Phenom II X3 720 Black Edition was successfully unlocked to become a quad-core CPU. The unlocked CPU was also happy to overclock as well, and we pushed it to 3.5GHz with 1.44 vcore, a 2GHz northbridge, and 1,600MHz DDR3 memory at tighter 7-8-7-20-1T timings at 1.75v. While not record breaking, that's really quite impressive for a £90 CPU that comes clocked at 2.8GHz.

The BIOS provides no capacity to adjust the CPU-northbridge multiplier, so overclocking the HyperTransport means the CPU-NB clock increases directly. Due to the limited overhead of CPU-NB, this means our HT overclock was limited to 235MHz. This was still actually slightly faster than we found the Gigabyte 785G board would go, but it's hardly a "high" clock and at least the Gigabyte's BIOS afforded the CPU-NB multiplier change option.

We found the overclocked CPU was somewhat fussy at remaining stable over long periods, but this maybe to do with unlocking the CPU cores itself, however coming back to the board day(s) later we found the overclocked settings sometimes rejected or Windows would bluescreen mid-boot. It wasn't a common occurrence, but slightly annoying nonetheless.

Overclocking the 785G northbridge frequency was very easy, and we managed a 25 per cent improvement to a round 750MHz. Asus also includes the option to overclock and overvolt the Sideport memory too, but it doesn't make any difference to performance.

Power Consumption

The idle performance is a few watts higher than the other mATX AMD boards, that isn't unexpect considering there's physically more board and the additional sideport memory. Surprisingly, the Asus sucks quite a bit less power at load which is a welcome surprise.