Asus M4A87TD/USB3 Motherboard Review

1. Introduction2. The M4A87TD/USB3 Motherboard3. Testing Methodlogy, BIOS and Overclocking4. PCMark Vantage5. 3DMark Vantage and 116. SiSoftware Sandra 20117. Cinebench R10 and R11.58. Super Pi Mod 1.59. KitGuru Photoshop Benchmark V1 (4)10. Media Encoding: Cyberlink MediaEspresso 611. Grand Theft Auto 4: EFLC12. Closing Thoughts13. View All Pages

We decided to use the AMD Phenom II X6 1075T  processor for testing as it is perfectly matched to this mid-range AMD board.  We combined this with a CoolIT Vantage A.L.C. which provides more than ample cooling performance for this processor.

Test System

Motherboard: Asus M4A87GT
CPU: AMD Phenom II X6 1075T
Memory: Corsair Dominator 1600MHz 4GB (2x 2GB) DDR3
PSU: Corsair HX850W
Chassis: Lian Li B25F
Graphics Card: HIS Radeon HD 5830 Turbo
Cooler: Coolit Vantage
Thermal Paste: Arctic Cooling MX-3
Hard Drive: Kingston SSDNow V+ 128GB

Windows 7 Home Premium 64 Bit
3DMark Vantage
3DMark 11
PCMark Vantage
Super Pi Mod 1.5
Cyberlink MediaEspresso 7
FRAPS Professional
SiSoftware Sandra 2011
Cinebench R10
Cinebench R11.5
KitGuru Photoshop Benchmark 1(4)
Grand Theft Auto 4: EFLC

All the latest BIOS updates and WHQL drivers are used during testing. We perform under real world conditions, meaning KitGuru test all games across five closely matched runs and average out the results to get an accurate median figure.

For our tests, we decided to overclock the system using the ‘Auto OC' functionality of Asus' TurboV software.  This achieved a reasonable overclock of 16%, taking the system from 3.00GHz to 3.50GHz by upping the base clock from 200MHz to 232Mhz, and leaving the multiplier at 15x.

The BIOS included with the motherboard is a standard affair, containing all the options we could possibly ask for.  We have included the full set of BIOS screenshots below.

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