Now that AMD is pushing out high quantities of its multicore processors, motherboard manufacturers are releasing boards to take advantage. The ASUS M3A is the first board billed as the first “Full Speed AMD Phenom Quad-Core Ready” board. It has a Socket AM2, allowing it to work with any of AMD’s multicore processors.

Chipset

The M3A uses the AMD 770 chipset. The 770 chipset was designed specifically for AMD multicore processors. It is designed to support speeds up to 5200MT/s (that’s 5.2 billion operations a second) using HyperTransport 3.0 technology. The 770 chipset also supports PCI Express 2.0 x16 graphics cards (one slot).

Ports

The board sports four dual channel DDR2 1066 RAM slots allowing eight GB of total memory. There are two PCI Express x1 slots and three standard PCI slots. Single PATA and floppy connectors are joined with four SATA ports allowing RAID 0, 1, or 0+1. There are four onboard USB 2.0 ports with support for two more. Six audio ports allow surround sound from the board as does an S/PDIF coax port. The board is a full ATX form factor with a 24 pin power connector and has an integrated 10/100/1000 LAN port.

Features

The board has many flashy, if not convenient features. It supports AMD’s Cool ‘n’ Quiet technology which adjusts processor voltage and frequency to keep the unit cool and quiet. AI Gear 2 and AI Nap allow users to adjust power consumption at the processor level to save energy. A noise filter reduces background white noise when recording and Precision Tweaker gives the user the ability to change system settings to provide for maximum performance.