Jignesh Satapara

We've looked previously at a number of ASRock AMD based integrated motherboards and today we have yet one more from the company who have been on a role lately. Today we'll be looking at another 780G based motherboard but this time one that mixes things up from their previous effort with the A780GXE/128MB.

Since AMD launched the 780G chipset earlier this year there's been some confusion about SidePort memory, what motherboards have it and what don't, what size, and how fast it is. This is fairly important as well at least when it came to integrated graphics as without it there is a major drop off in performance. The ASRock 780GXE contains 128MB of DDDR2 sideport memory on board which can run at 1066MHz. This should help quite a bit with gaming scores or if you don't want to use any of your system's memory then it'll resolve that as well. The other major feature of the 780GXE board is support for 140W TDP processors which helps if you find one of these around. AMD is starting to phase out the 140W 9950BE to 125W now but who knows when that might creep up again the future.

The board's layout is quite good for a budget and integrated motherboard. Not much should actually get in the way here. One problem that might occur is if you're using high-end RAM which extends 3-4" in the air and a very-highend heatsink it might be hard to place RAM in the closet slot. Other wise it shouldn't be an issue. Not much cooling is needed for the 55nm AMD chipsets so the few heatsinks are more than adequate.

I/O ports on the back consist of a PS2 mouse and keyboard port, VGA-Output, DVI-Output (ASRock also includes a handy DVI-to-HDMI adapter), six USB 2.0 ports, an E-SATA port, Firewire, 1 Gigabit Ethernet jack, and analog HD audio output. Isn't it great that motherboard companies finally started putting 6 USB 2.0 ports on the back? Long overdue and now even on boards under $100.

Onboard expansion there are headers for more USB and Firewire ports, a PCI-Express 1x slot, two PCI-Express 16x slots, and three PCI slots. As with all ASRock boards with SLI or Crossfire they still feature the older switch card to go between Crossfire and single card mode. We wonder the if the costs of adding this part to the motherboard is more than what it would be to feature a board that automatically detects it. For most people who it'll only matter once or twice in the motherboard's lifetime so it's not a big deal but still we hope the next-generation of ASRock motherboards move past that.

Standard accessories are included here including I/O shield, a few SATA cables, IDE cable, and more.

We see a fairly standard ASRock BIOS here which is quite good overall. One thing I like is that the multipliers no longer have to be keyed in and start at the defaults rather than the lowest value possible.

Even without the advanced overclocking features of the SB750 chipset we were easily able to hit 3.1GHz stable on the ASRock with our power hungry 140W CPU which we raised the voltage on anymore. How other sites have such trouble getting up to 3GHz we're not sure of as with the BE processors we've had no problems.

Here are the spec from ASRock.

CPU - Support for Socket AM2+ / AM2 processors: AMD Phenom™ FX / Phenom / Athlon 64 FX / Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core / Athlon X2 Dual-Core / Athlon 64 / Sempron processor
- Supports CPU up to 140W
- AMD LIVE!™ Ready
- Supports AMD's Cool 'n' Quiet Technology
- FSB 2600 MHz (5.2 GT/s)
- Supports Untied Overclocking Technology
- Supports Hyper-Transport 3.0 (HT 3.0) Technology
- AM3 CPU Ready
Chipset - Northbridge: AMD 780G
- Southbridge: AMD SB700
Memory - Dual Channel DDR2 memory technology
- 4 x DDR2 DIMM slots
- Supports DDR2 1066/800/667/533 non-ECC, un-buffered memory
- Max. capacity of system memory: 16GB*

*Due to the operating system limitation, the actual memory size may be less than 4GB for the reservation for system usage under Windows® XP and Windows® Vista™. For Windows® XP 64-bit and Windows® Vista™ 64-bit with 64-bit CPU, there is no such limitation.

BIOS - 8Mb AMI BIOS
- AMI Legal BIOS
- Supports "Plug and Play"
- ACPI 1.1 Compliance Wake Up Events
- Supports Jumperfree
- SMBIOS 2.3.1 Support
- CPU, DRAM, NB Voltage Multi-adjustment
- Supports Smart BIOS
Audio, Video and Networking
Graphics - Integrated AMD Radeon HD 3200 graphics
- DX10 class iGPU, Pixel Shader 4.0
- Max. shared memory 512MB
- Integrated 128MB side port memory for iGPU
- Dual VGA Output: Support DVI-D and D-Sub ports by independent display controllers
- Supports HDCP function with DVI-D port
- Supports Full HD 1080p Blu-ray (BD) / HD-DVD playback
Audio - 7.1 CH Windows® Vista™ Premium Level HD Audio (ALC888 Audio Codec)
LAN - PCIE x1 Gigabit LAN 10/100/1000 Mb/s
- Realtek RTL8111C-VCO-GR
- Supports Wake-On-LAN
Expansion / Connectivity
Slots - 2 x PCI Express 2.0 x16 slots (green @ x16 mode, blue @ x8 mode)
- 1 x PCI Express 2.0 x1 slot
- 3 x PCI slots
- Supports ATI™ CrossFire™ and Hybrid CrossFireX™
Connector - 6 x SATAII 3.0 Gb/s connectors, support RAID (RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 10, and JBOD), NCQ, AHCI and "Hot Plug" functions
- 1 x eSATAII 3.0 Gb/s connector (shared with 1 SATAII port)
- 1 x ATA133 IDE connector (supports 2 x IDE devices)
- 1 x Floppy connector
- 1 x IR header
- 1 x COM port header
- 1 x HDMI_SPDIF header
- 1 x IEEE 1394 header
- CPU/Chassis FAN connector
- 24 pin ATX power connector
- 8 pin 12V power connector
- SLI/XFire power connector
- CD in header
- Front panel audio connector
- 2 x USB 2.0 headers (support 4 USB 2.0 ports)
- 1 x USB/WiFi header
Rear Panel I/O I/O Panel
- 1 x PS/2 Mouse Port
- 1 x PS/2 Keyboard Port
- 1 x VGA/D-Sub Port
- 1 x VGA/DVI-D Port
- 6 x Ready-to-Use USB 2.0 Ports
- 1 x eSATAII Port
- 1 x RJ-45 LAN Port with LED (ACT/LINK LED and SPEED LED)
- 1 x IEEE 1394 Port
- HD Audio Jack: Side Speaker / Rear Speaker / Central / Bass / Line in / Front Speaker / Microphone
Other Features / Miscellaneous
Unique Feature - ASRock OC Tuner
- Intelligent Energy Saver
- Hybrid Booster:
- CPU Frequency Stepless Control
- ASRock U-COP
- Boot Failure Guard (B.F.G.)
- ASRock AM2 Boost: ASRock Patented Technology to boost memory performance up to 12.5%
Support CD - Drivers, Utilities, AntiVirus Software (Trial Version)
Accessories - 1 x ASRock SLI/XFire Switch Card
- Quick Installation Guide, Support CD, I/O Shield
- Floppy/ATA 133 Cables
- 2 x SATA Data Cables (optional)
- 1 x SATA 1 to 1 Power Cable (optional)
Hardware Monitor - CPU Temperature Sensing
- Chassis Temperature Sensing
- CPU Fan Tachometer
- Chassis Fan Tachometer
- CPU Quiet Fan
- Voltage Monitoring: +12V, +5V, +3.3V, Vcore
Form Factor - ATX Form Factor: 12.0-in x 9.6-in, 30.5 cm x 24.4 cm
- Solid Capacitor for CPU power
OS - Microsoft® Windows® XP / XP Media Center / XP 64-bit / Vista™ / Vista™ 64-bit compliant
Certifications - FCC, CE, WHQL

Here is our test system

Our test system was Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 with Catalyst 8.9 drivers.

We tested the transfer rates of our Western Digital 750GB to tested AMD's SB750 southbridge. We compared this board to the high-end Asus board with the SB750 chipset and 790FX Northbridge with no integrated video.

Pretty close but the Asus has a slight edge in hard drive tests.

Next we tested external USB 2.0 transfer rates with a WD Raptor hard drive.

Next we tested game performance against Gigabyte's 780G motherboard.

So thanks to the high-clock of the sideport memory we see a very slight gain over the Gigabyte 780G motherboard.

Power consumption is up next. Idle measurements were taking at 5 minutes idle into Windows Vista desktop, load was measured with Valve's map creator benchmark which stresses all four cores. The Asus board was using a Radeon HD 4670 video card as it has no onobard graphics.