I have built many computers over the past 10 years or so, and in spite of the fact that so many people have raved about Asus, I was sold on MSI, ECS, and even did one real economy build using a Jetway. All that has changed with my Asus M3A78-CM Motherboard. Every motherboard I’ve used with the exception of one faulty board, have all worked very well and met my expectations. Well, I just did another economy build and had to build a new computer for under $400. At first everything was reaching the $500 mark due to case prices, but by the time I finished some shrewed shopping, I had a new dual core, fast and yet tremendously upgradable computer. The best part of this new computer is it’s solid performance and stability.
I’m not into overclocking, though I’ve done it just to prove what a computer can do, but this economy build I did contains an AMD Athlon 64 X2, 2 GB Ram, and a mid tower case. The computer is fast, it can encode DVD format video to MPEG 4 or DIVX at 120-140 frames per second which is 4 times the watching rate. A 2 hour movie will crunch in 30 minutes. With the Asus M3A78-CM motherboard BIOS I was able to quickly and easily overclock and test this computer at a 10% increase, but then set it back to normal.
One of my key goals with building a budget computer was to have a finished product that would allow me to upgrade in a year or two. The Asus M3A78-CM motherboard gives me that ability. To keep the cost down I went with an old hard drive from my old computer, but everything else was purchased. Spending conservatively but leaving room for growth, the Asus M3A78-CM motherboard was the most expensive component of the build at $75 from Newegg. Along with this I purchased a case for $30, a 430 Watt powersupply for $40, an AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200+ for under $60, (I still think dollar per peformance AMD is still tops, but they need to make a breakthrough or get lost in the dust), 2 Gb RAM, and a dual layer DVD burner. The total cost was about $256 + $80 for an LCD monitor from Tiger Direct, plus shipping.
The Asus M3A78-CM Micro ATX motherboard leaves me room to increase my RAM to 8Gb, the AM2+ socket will allow me to more than double my current performance by dropping in an AMD Phenom 9950 Quad Core when the prices come down a little. The motherboard also has 1 IDE commector for up to 2 ide drives and 6 SATA connectors for ample storage growth. Even though this motherboard is a micro ATX, it has 2 PCI slots, 1 PCI X1 and 1 PCI X16. For starters I am using the onboard ATI Radeon HD3100 to spare the expense of a video card, and the computer is still fast, we watch movies and streaming videos on the computer without a hiccup, and once I had everything installed, I left the computer on running WinXP for a full week without having to reboot it in spite of crunching videos, surfing the web, and doing some graphic work.
Since the build, I have added a wifi card and a Magic Jack telephone and with a savings of about $70 per month on phone bills this new computer will pay for itself in 4 months time.
Advertised specs for the Asus M3A78-CM motherboard are:
Socket: AM2+
CPU Support: Phenom FX / Phenom / Athlon 64 FX / Athlon 64 X2
FSB: 2600MHz Hyper Transport (5200 MT/s)
North Bridge: AMD 780V
South Bridge: AMD SB700
Memory Slots: 4 (up to two Gig each)
Memory type: DDR2 800 / 1066
Max Memory: 8Gb
Dual channel supported
PCIe X1: 1
PCIe X16: 1
PCI: 2
IDE: 1
SATA: 6 – 3Gb/s
Raid 0/1/10
Onboard Video: ATI Radeon HD 3100
Audio: 8 channel
LAN: 10/100/1000
PS2 ports: 1
Video Ports: VGA / DVI / Display
USB: 6 / 2.0 w/support for 6 additional
All in all, this has been my fastest computer, perhaps the most stable of many builds over the past 10 years. I am very pleased and would purchase another Asus M3A78-CM motherboard for another build.
