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Asus’s M3N78 Pro motherboard looks sparse next to the feature-packed boards from MSI and Foxconn, but it’s also around £30 cheaper than MSI’s DKA790GX Platinum. Like other AM2+ motherboards, it supports the backwards-compatible Phenom II processor and did remarkably well in our tests, although it performed disappointingly in the important Overall test. It’s the only motherboard here without an AMD chipset. Instead, it uses an Nvidia GeForce 8300 chipset, complete with integrated graphics. It has only a single HDMI video output, although it comes with a slightly unwieldy HDMI-to-DVI converter cable and a VGA header bracket. The minimalist approach to video ports is reflected in the layout of the rest of the board, which gives you plenty of uncluttered space to build in. There’s also a single PCI Express x16 slot, so you can add a dedicated graphics card if you’re interested in gaming. The positioning of the slot could also restrict access to some of the six SATA connectors if you buy a long or bulky graphics card.
This is the only motherboard in the group that can handle 16GB of RAM, although you’re unlikely to need that much in the foreseeable future. With recent sharp increases in the price of computer hardware, the M3N78 Pro isn’t as cheap as it was earlier in the year, but it’s still an excellent motherboard at a fair price. If you are looking to build a decent computer on a reasonable budget then the M3N78 Pro is a great choice.
