THE BOARD WE'RE testing today, the Asus M3A78¬EMH HDMI, promises to buck the trend of terrible integrated graphics. Based on the new 780G chipset from AMD, this is the first integrated graphics chipset that is based on a current generation GPU architecture. The 780G chip set is AMD's new offering for low-cost, mainstream PCs using inte¬grated graphics.

The Radeon HD 3200 graphics include full DX10 support and UVD video processing, with DVI, VGA, and HDMI interfaces available onboard. The UVD video engine decodes H.264 and VC-1. This means that you can watch Blu-ray mov¬ies at full1080P resolution without needing a separate graphics card. The other interesting feature on this chipset is Hybrid Crossfire. This combines the on-board graphiCS with a cheap discrete graphics card like the Radeon 3450 to give much better performance. The board has six SATA ports with support for RAID, 4 USB ports on the back panel, and Gigabit Ethernet. It lacks FireWire and eSATA support, which is a pity.

Performance
We tested the M3A78 with a Phenom 9500 processor, 2 GB of Kingston HyperX DDR-2 memory, and our WD Raptor 150 GB hard drive. The integrated graph¬ics was used instead of a dis¬crete graphiCS chip. The board did quite well in the PC World WoridBench test, scoring 73. This score was slightly lower than it should be, but that was due to a bug present in the current generation of Phenom pro¬cessors. With an older AthIon 5600 X2, the board scored 88. The gaming tests were more important, since we wanted to see if newer games ran properly.

The 780G did not disappoint. At 1024x768 and medium detail levels, Unreal Tourna¬ment 3 and Company of Heroes returned scores of 28 frames per second and 41 frames respectively. The games were actually quite playable, and older games ran much more smoothly. Pro Evolution Soccer 2008 was completely smooth at 60 frames at medium detail levels. Doom 3 and F.E.A.R scored 52 and 24 fps respectively, again under medium detail levels.



For an integrated graphics solution, these scores are very good. It even man¬aged to score 1367 3D Marks. All these numbers essentially mean that you can get a recent game, play it with some settings turned down, and still enjoy it. Sure, Crysis didn't run too well, but then, Cry- sis never runs too well. The Hybrid Crossfire feature works as advertised. Toss in a cheap (Rs. 2,500) Radeon 3450, and you get a perfor¬mance increase of anywhere between 40-80 percent, depending on the game.

To test the HD video features, we used a 1080p clip from the movie Serenity. Using an Athlon XP 3000 single core processor, the board was able to play the entire clip averaging only 15 percent CPU usage. This is very impressive, especially since the same file is com¬pletely unplayable if hard¬ware acceleration is turned off. You do need software that supports the card to get these numbers. The popular VLC player does not work, but Power DVD does.

Conclusion
This board takes every other integrated graphics chipset to the street and pounds them into the dust. It'll work very well as a home theatre Pc. The chipset does not support 7.1 audio over HDMI, so that's a small caveat, but for everything else it is a very good mother¬board. Pop in a cheap 3450, and you can actually play games without feeling miser¬able. We liked this board.