Introduction

AMD's persistence with the Phenom II processor is to be commended.

It's definitely no major competitor for Intel's Core i7 processors, but to take on the Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad processors, especially in a price war, AMD's top clocked processor is alot cheaper than Intel's Core 2 Quad Q9770. We honestly expected AMD to go a bit more stagnant on the chipset front and deal more with the processor, but this is far from the case.

AMD's 785G chipset may sound like a slower model compared to the 790FX and 790GX, while it lacks dual x16 lanes that the 790FX has, the 785G supports all the same features that the 790GX owns such as SidePort memory, support for CrossFireX with dual x8 PCI Express slots and the latest Southbridge. It has a major up on the 790GX and that's a 4xxx HD Radeon graphics core, which brings to the table DX10.1 compatibility, which is especially good if you're going to run Vista and Aero desktop or Windows 7 and Aero.

ASRock has been a company that of late has managed to impress us a lot - at first dealing with the more value and OEM side of things, ASRock has moved into overclocking and tweaking type of boards and is doing a pretty good job.

Today's offering is the M3A785GXH/128M, this board is available on Newegg for an incredible $99.99 USD. Is it worth the dollars? Does it overclock and what does it have for you? Let's get those questions answered right now.