Customer Reviews

ASUS M3N78 Pro AM2+ Nvidia 8300 DDR2-1066 Nvidia Geforce 8300 IGP ATX Motherboard

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This motherboard (I have two of them) offers tremendous connectivity for internal and external devices and has many other excellent features, but I have also encountered some problems:

(1) I have 1066 MHz DDR2 DRAM, but I don't seem to be able to make it run at 1066 MHz. Via the BIOS setup / Advanced / CPU Config / DRAM Config, I enabled three alternative BIOS DRAM configurations (Automatic, Manual 800 MHz, and Manual 1066 MHz). For each of these configurations, I ran the quicksort benchmark using a dataset of 2e7 single-precision random numbers. 2e7 single-precision numbers will occupy 8e7 Bytes (much too large to fit into the cache), so this is a good test of DRAM performance. Compute times were identical for all three of these configurations (10.95 seconds). I conclude that the Asus M3N78 PRO BIOS DRAM speed setting does nothing. Prior to buying this motherboard, I had several discussions with tech support, and was assured that I would be able to run the DRAM at 1066 MHz. I am very disappointed to find that this is not the case.

(2) Overall boot time (with Windows XP) is not as good as I would have expected. The Asus splash screen can be disabled, but this does not seem to have any impact on boot time.

(3) The "AMD Cool'n'Quiet" function is supposed to adjust power consumption and fan speed to reflect CPU usage, but as far as I can tell, enabling this in the BIOS appears to have absolutely no effect.

(4) The user manual doesn't provide much information. For example, the section of the user manual that covers the BIOS setup mentions the "AMD Live!" and "AMD Cool'n'Quiet" functions but does not explain what they do or discuss any tradeoffs that the user should consider when deciding whether to enable them.