Product Reviews

Asus' new Socket AM2+ motherboard bears a characteristically opaque model number; but its name does at least indicate the board's most distinctive feature - an HDMI port, courtesy of the AMD 780G chipset.

Coupled with the onboard Radeon HD 3200 GPU's hardware HD decoder, this means the M3A-H could be a good foundation for an entertainment PC. It's worth bearing in mind, however, that the full ATX form factor limits you to a large case.

Video playback isn't the HD 3200's only strength: it's a full DirectX 10 GPU, and while not up to the full Crysis experience (even in 1,024 x 768 at low detail it averaged only 17fps), older games should be playable.

Hybrid Crossfire is supported, so you can team up the onboard graphics with a discrete card - though we're yet to be persuaded that that's worthwhile. And the onboard GPU has no dedicated memory either, instead devouring up to 256MB of your system RAM.

For desktop use, a supplied adaptor converts the HDMI port into a DVI socket, and there's a D-Sub as well for connection to older displays. Other connectors, however, are a little thin on the ground.

You get just four rear-facing

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USB ports, and though four internal headers give you scope to connect up to eight more, no brackets are provided. There's no eSATA or FireWire, nor even headers to connect them, and the six SATA channels and single IDE channel are sufficient rather than generous. There is, however, a coaxial digital audio output on the backplate, and an internal header for S/PDIF.

The M3A-H plays well with other components: not all 780G-based boards can handle the Phenom X4 9850, with its 4GHz effective HyperTransport and 125W TDP, but the Asus accepted one happily.

It'll take the usual 8GB of DDR2 RAM too, spread across four slots, at speeds up to 1,066MHz. Three PCI slots and two PCI-E 1x slots give plenty of expansion options, though you're limited by the chipset to a single PCI-E 16x slot.

As with Asus' more sophisticated boards, the M3A-H has plenty of overclocking features, plus the ability to flash the BIOS directly from a USB memory drive - a nice thought in an age when floppy drives are thin on the ground.

And if you're in a hurry, Asus' ExpressGate Lite system lets you boot up in a few seconds into a bare-bones Linux-based OS which includes a web browser and Skype. For some users that might make Windows redundant altogether.

Despite its well-featured firmware, there's no disguising the fact that the M3A-H/HDMI is a cut-down board; other models offer more connectors of various sorts, plus conveniences like onboard power and reset buttons.

But Asus has pruned thoughtfully, and what remains will be ample for the vast majority of desktop or entertainment PCs. Factor in the powerful integrated graphics which means that, for almost all uses, you won't need a graphics card, and for £60 it's a very appealing formula.