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The BIOS

The BIOS for the M3A78-T is quite overclocker friendly, and also supports Asus' "ExpressGate" instant-on Linux. However, unlike previous versions of Asus motherboards with ExpressGate that we've reviewed, here ExpressGate must be installed by the user either to a SATA hard drive or to a USB flash disk - I guess Asus wanted to save the cost of the flash chips that would otherwise be needed on the motherboard.

As usual, the motherboard starts up with a splash screen giving the model number.

The Main menu and its sub-menu's are quite standard.

The Advanced menu has the three most interesting menus on it:

• JumperFree Configuration
• CPU Configuration
• Chipset

Plenty of settings - and a couple of sub-menu's - to tweak here!

Here is the memory configuration sub-menu:

And the DRAM Timing configuration sub-menu:

The CPU configuration lets us control Cool'n'Quiet and more...

The Internal Graphics Configuration screen is great - I was able to overclock the GFX Core to 1000MHz! (I did have to add a fan to the Northbridge heatsink) and while I was able to increase the sideport memory to 800MHz (though it did not make any difference.)