ASUS M4A88TD-V EVO/USB3 review

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ASUS 880G motherboard review  

Here we stumble into a plethora of things. First up, the DIMM slots, DDR3 of course. Up-to 16GB may be installed and the board will actually support 2000 MHz straight out of the BIOS (though overclocked) supported are DDR3 800/1066/1333/1600*/2000* MHz (*=OC settings from within BIOS).

VERY hard to spot, but right to the ATX power connector is a MemOK button which allows your motherboard to boot even if there might be some compatibility issues between the motherboard and the memory. All the user has to do, is to simply hold this button, at first a "MemOK!" function will start, visible by a red LED that begins to blink. The motherboard will now take charge of a self-memory patching process, and fix the memory compatibility before your very own eyes, till the system is finally able to boot up.

Next to the MemOK button are two switches as well, for enabling core unlocking and Turbo Key II, which when enabled will overclock the processor a little (3.7 GHz)

ASUS 880G motherboard review

 

You'll have five full fetched SATA 6G connectors and then one (on the rear IO) eSATA2 connector. You'll have decent options for SSD/HDD/ODD connectivity alright.

ASUS 880G motherboard review

We flip the board around to top side and go into Populous mode, we stumble into internal low-level connectivity like front panel headers, two fan headers and more USB headers.  Overall board design is good though, everything is located at the right spot.

ASUS 880G motherboard review

We also see the two PCIe x16 Gen2 slots here (can be setup as 1x16, 1x4). There's also three regular PCI slots and one x1 PCIe slot. That's pretty darn nice connectivity alright. Crossfire is supported as ASUS states, SLI isn't. I would not go CrossfireX on this board either though.

Okay, one last look my friends ... then it's crunch time. Priced at roughly 100  EUR this is going to be an interesting motherboard alright, will the money you need to put down be justified? But it's time to see how well it performs, don't you think? First we'll be managing a little stress test at default configuration.

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