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Asus’ M4A785D-M Pro is a compact microATX motherboard. It has an integrated ATI Radeon graphics chip capable of playing high definition video, which is useful if you want to build a compact home theatre PC. If you later add a dedicated graphics card, the Hybrid CrossFireX support can pair both graphics chips together to theoretically boost 3D performance, although the speed gains are nothing to write home about. This motherboard uses DDR2 memory, which is slower than newer DDR3 memory on paper, but this board wasn’t significantly slower than DDR3 AM3 boards in our tests. The M4A785D-M Pro has six USB ports, as well as three headers which can be turned into another six ports using backplates, which should be enough for all but the biggest peripheral collections. There’s also an eSATA port for connecting fast external storage and five SATA ports for plugging in internal hard disks and optical drives. As expected for a microATX motherboard, the M4A785D-M Pro has fewer expansion card slots for adding internal peripherals than a full-size ATX motherboard. There’s still enough for most purposes though. There two PCI slots and a single PCI Express x1 slot. If you want to connect a surround sound speaker system, there’s no need to add a sound card as an optical S/PDIF port and S/PDIF header are already present in addition to the usual analogue surround sound outputs.
At just £60, Asus’ M4A785D-M Pro is a great choice for building a compact PC on a budget, whether for home theatre or general purpose use. Unless you need more PCI slots, it’s a better value and better designed choice than MSI’s similarly priced 770-G45 and wins our Budget Buy award.
