Introduction

Last week, we posted two reviews, one Gigabyte mATX/DDR2 and another is an ASUS ATX/DDR3 AMD 785G board review.

Today, we are going to take a look at another board which is somewhat uses a slightly different combination that the two previously reviewed product - ASRock M3A785GMH/128M.

The ASRock M3A785GMH/128M is a microATX mainboard that is powered by the AMD 785G + SB710 chipsets. As we have already introduced before, this chipset just like 780G can be used to pair up with either DDR2 or DDR3 DIMM slots for AM2+/AM3 processors with dual memory controllers within. The ASRock M3A785GMH/128M chose to be the first MicroATX board to feature a DDR3 support and can run up to DDR3-1600 through overclocking.

For those of you who are new to this chipset, it is now known as ATI Radeon HD 4200 (DirectX 10.1, Shader Model 4.1 support) with iGPU running at a default 500MHz and sideport memory at 667 MHz (DDR3-1333) on this mainboard (the Gigabyte DDR2 mATX board we reviewed ran at 553 (DDR3-1066) for it's 128MB of sideport memory.

The board has one PCIe x16 lane for external graphics card. It support IGP for HDMI, D-SUB or DVI-D display output. The board supports sideport memory as mentioned and can be paired to run with in Hybrid CrossFire with a compatible ATi card.

The board has 5 x SATAII 3.0 Gb/s connectors, support RAID (RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 10 and JBOD), NCQ, AHCI and "Hot Plug" functions and 1 x eSATAII Port, PCIE Gigabit LAN 10/100/1000 Mb/s. Other features include ASRock Instant Boot, Instant Flash, ASRock OC Tuner, Intelligent Energy Saver, 7.1 CH Windows® Vista™ Premium Level HD Audio (ALC888Audio Codec) with Windows® Vista™ Premium 2008 Logo Ready and it is also Widnows 7 Ready.

For a greener environment, ASRock is the world's first manufacturer to incorporate the EuP standard. EuP stands for Energy Using Product, was a provision regulated by European Union to define the power consumption for the completed system. With the great quantity and the popularly using of the electrical products nowadays and the continuously increasing of the electrical products categories in the following 20 to 30 years, European Union decided to establish an effective strategy to solve the energy consumption problem. That is, according to EuP, the total AC power of the completed system shall be under 1.00W in off mode condition.

According to a demo video by ASRock themselves, it is proven that other brands takes as much as double the amount of wattage in standby mode.

The package

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