Value and Conclusion
There's a lot to like about the Asus M4A785TD-V Evo, as it unlocks cores and overclocks well, and looks great as well. There's certainly enough ports and connectors to keep all but the most demanding users happy, and it comes in with a very competitive price - £70 to 75 - that definitely means it should be shortlist item it you're looking at an inexpensive AMD build.
The performance fluctuates in comparison to the Gigabyte 785G board: sometimes faster, sometimes slower depending on the test and in all but the gaming tests the older 780G model, with DDR2 memory, still keeps up the pace. Does the Sideport memory really make a difference yet? Not really, no. The Asus board has no tangible lead at stock speeds in game performance over non Sideport boards.
As a full-size ATX board, the Asus should be better laid out than it is - there's tons of room to play with and yet there are still issues with the placement of power and IDE ports. There are positives to the layout (there's no SATA or PCI-Express x1 conflict for a start) to be sure, but it's not perfect.
Without the CPU-NB multiplier adjustment in the BIOS, you're limited in the amount of HyperTransport overclocking available, which means if you're not spending more for Black Edition parts - a likelihood given the board cost - then your OC overhead is more limited. All of this board's undoubtedly powerful hardware and overvolting abilities are then a bit wasted, which is frustrating because like most Asus motherboards - the overclocking experience was exceptionally easy.
The bottom line is that the Asus M4A785TD-V Evo is really a very good motherboard at the right price, but just drops short in our expectations of an outright recommendation.
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- 8/10
Score Guide
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