Customer Reviews

Asus M4N78 Pro Socket AM2+/AM3 GeForce 8300 / DDR2 / HDMI / Hybrid SLI / ATX Motherboard

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a great board for those who want to upgrade to an AM3 cpu in the future, but don't have the money yet. I got this board in combination with the Athlon 7750 BE 2.7ghz AM2+ AMD processor (actually a Phenom - it overclocks easily to 3.2 ghz) and some cheap stt pc6400 dual channel ddr2 memory (4gb). It runs fast and it runs stable.
Currently I have Kubuntu 9.04 installed on it and it works out of the box. Only thing that needed to happen was to install the proprietary nvidia drivers. Windows 7 also runs without any problems out of the box. So, a great board for a great price.

This board has a good layout. My GTX 260 sits well without blocking many components. Having the IDE slot in the left corner is a misfit. Besides that everything is placed at right place. Big plus is it supports my current AM2 processor and i have room to upgrade to AM2+ or AM3 in the future. The board comes with quite interesting tools for OC. For persons like me who don't bother too much to tweak with the voltages and others manually, the EPU software comes in handy. Asus AI suite, Turbo key, Express gate for accessing the web in 5 secs from startup are some cool tools to play with. Not sure how frequently i would use them.

The inbuilt Anti-surge protection is also a good feature. Having lost my previous board to a surge, this would be useful to me. Having a GTX 260 sitting there, i dont have a need to use the hybrid sli. Might be useful if you want bit more power. Checkout for the compatible cards before you decide. The inbuilt HD audio is cool. I did not bother to connect my sound blaster PCI card. Satisfied with the onboard audio which you can get through optical, coaxial, hdmi or the regular analogs outputs.

Some one who is more into OC may like this board more than me. I bought it especially for the layout as i dont want to loose any sata ports to fit my GTX 260.

Overall, solid board with good features.


Update: I am reducing this to 2 star. I got horrible issues during startup. I can hear the DVD player sound, fan sound, but the booting doesn't occur. I need to try to boot 3-4 times before it starts up fine. I have almost crashed my vista because of this. I am not able to get the audio out of the hdmi port. Using the optical port now So, i am downgrading my stars to 2.

The Asus M4N78 PRO is a very capable Motherboard, broad range of compatible RAM and CPU list. I have had no issues and the overclocking features are great for novice and gamers alike.

First board came with a dead HDMI and almost non-working NIC. The replacement also had NIC issues. It would work somewhat okay at 10Mb. If set at 100M or 1000Mb it would barely work with many lost packets. BTW, Linux/Ubuntu installed quite nice! I was very disappointed to send it back !8-(. Both MB were returned and I got an MSI instead which WORKs, but I like the ASUS' looks and BIOS settings better. Oh, well.

Excellent Motherboard... if it works.
Many space for upgrades, special features, nice for overclocking. I bought 2 for me and a friend and both were DOA. Had to change them for a M4N78 LE in a hurry.