It’s been a while since nVIDIA introduced nForce 780a i.e. 750a chipset. These chipsets have GeForce 8200 IGP that offers good IGP performances but still a little bit below those that offer AMD 780G and 790GX chipsets. Also introduced is nForce 730a chipset, as derivative of those and with the same graphics core. nF750a and nF730a are single chip solutions with the difference of nonexistence support for SLi for nF730a, therefore it’s attended for cheaper solutions but with possibility of Hybrid SLi support.

Asus offered for 100€ and less model based on 730a chipset. M3N78 Pro is very neatly and quality built motherboard with no bugs and omissions but in a low cost bundle. You will be surprised by overclock potential of this motherboard, but let’s go step by step!


Layout and BIOS

M3N78 Pro is equipped with quality solid electrolytes, 5-phase voltage filtration and with last generation MOSFET drivers with less heat dissipation. Motherboard has 6 SATA ports but if you use graphics card that has long layout, you couldn’t use SATA1 and SATA2 port. Chipset, that doesn’t heat up much, is cooled by one passive cooler. Power section is without heatsink. During tests, it doesn’t warm too much but if you do some overclocking we suggest you to mount additional fan. This will prolong motherboard’s life and secure more stabile work. BIOS is standard Asus’ with vertical organization. It’s possible to control through BIOS, all frequencies – HTT, northbridge for Phenoms and also voltages for cores, northbridge, chipset and memory. Memory voltage allows values up to 2.5V and for processor up to 1.55V, which is more than enough even for a bit more extreme “overclock adventures”.

The biggest surprise follows after realization that this motherboard doesn’t have at all options for adjusting memory timing!? Memory timings are read from SPD (Serial Present Detect) chip located on memory modules and thanks to them it’s capable to perform automatic adjustment of DRAM controller. If you set memory at 1066, timings will be CAS5 7-7-18 2 t, and for 800MHz they will be CAS5 5-5-15 2T and so on…


Overclocking

Until we tried Phenom X3 8750 on this motherboard we couldn’t even imagine that we can reach 3.45GHz with simple increasing of HTT bus frequency. 3.34GHz was reached with high memory and NB frequencies accompanied by complete work stability and all that with 1.45V core voltage. Like every Asus’ motherboard and this one “suffers” from “vdrop” syndrome so the real voltage was around 1.41V. After we have set memory at 800MHz, reduced NB multiplier from 9x to 8x and increased HTT bus at 278MHz, we managed to pull out even 44% of stabile overclock, which is up to now the biggest overclock result that we got this way with Phenom processor.

Performance scaling is also excellent, because of memory timing which is during BIOS settings at 800MHz automatically “stretched” in relation to 1066MHz settings. By doing this, we could reach 3.34GHz for processor, 2226MHz for northbridge and 1112MHz for DDR2 memory with latencies CL5 5-5-15 2T.
Results speak for themselves. What’s more, BIOS reaction on incorrect settings is brilliant. During error in overclocking you just need to press Insert and motherboard will instantly react and after that you can rectify incorrectly set parameters.