Media PC components
Asus M3N78-EMH
| Manufacturer: | Price: |
| £51.1 inc VAT |
| Reviewer: | Review Date: |
| James Morris | Aug 2008 |
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| Speed | 22/30 | 73% |
| Features | 40/45 | 89% |
| Value | 18/25 | 72% |
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Verdict: Expensive, but performance and features make it the best Socket AM2 option.
While ASRock keeps down the cost of its motherboards, Asus has taken its usual premium strategy with the M3N78-EMH. Using the Nvidia GeForce 8200 motherboard chipset, and offering support for all Socket AM2 and AM2 CPUs, this motherboard's features include PCI-E 2.0 and Hybrid SLI; this means that the on-board graphics and a discrete Nvidia card can join forces for extra performance.
However, you might not even need to add a discrete graphics card to a media PC. The M3N78-EMH boasts DirectX 10-compatible graphics, although the GeForce 8200 is only slightly more capable than the GeForce 7-series GPU in the ASRock, so don't bother reaching for the Crysis DVD. Monitor connection options are comprehensive too. Whereas the ASRock supports HDCP over its DVI output, the M3N78-EMH has an integrated HDMI port, for which HDCP is a standard feature. Thanks to Nvidia's PureVideo HD, H.264 support goes up to 1080p, so you could build your own fully featured Blu-ray player with lots more besides. There's also a good old-fashioned D-SUB port for analogue displays and a DVI port for hooking up your media PC to a TFT monitor.
Like the Abit I-N73HD motherboard, the M3N78-EMH uses a high-end Realtek audio chipset - in this case, the ALC883. This supports 7.1 surround sound, with the requisite mini-jacks available on the back panel. There's an S/PDIF connector on the motherboard, but no cable is supplied to run this to a backplate. Home cinema connections will have to be analogue, unless you mod the board yourself. There are four DIMM sockets, six S-ATA II ports, 12 USB 2 ports, but no FireWire.
Although a Socket AM2 CPU won't provide Core 2-beating performance, the M3N78-EMH was noticeably quicker than the ASRock in our Media Benchmarks. The image editing score was the only discrepancy - it was 2 per cent slower. The video encoding score was roughly the same, but the multitasking test completed an astonishing 17 per cent faster.
While the M3N78-EMH is the most expensive motherboard in this test, you get what you pay for, such as the integrated HDMI. We'd like to have seen S/PDIF audio on the back panel, but otherwise this would make an excellent basis for a media PC.
