Asus M4A88T-M Motherboard Review

1. Introduction2. The M4A88T-M Motherboard3. Testing Methodology4. 3DMark Vantage and 3DMark 115. SiSoft Sandra 20116. Cinebench R10 and R11.57. Super Pi Mod 1.58. Media Encoding: Cyberlink MediaEspresso 69. Grand Theft Auto 4: EFLC10. Closing Thoughts11. View All Pages

We decided to use the AMD Phenom II X6 1090T  processor for testing as it is perfectly matched to this mid-range AMD board.  We combined this with a Noctua C12P heatsink which provides more than ample cooling performance for this processor.

Test System

Motherboard: Asus M4A88T-M
CPU: AMD Phenom II X6 1090T
Memory: Kingston HyperX 2133MHz 4GB (2x 2GB) DDR3
PSU: Corsair TX650W
Chassis: Fractal Design Define XL
Graphics Card: AMD Radeon HD 6790
Cooler: Noctua C12P
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 Asus' TurboV software.  Unfortunately this doesn't have the ‘Auto OC' functionality that was available on the other two boards we tested but it does allow us to alter a number of settings without having to enter the BIOS.  We overclocked the system by 10% to 3.52 GHz using a baseclock of 220 and a multiplier of 16x.  We tried to overclock the system further but became unstable – even though we wouldn't expect a Micro ATX board to overclock as well as a full size board.

The BIOS included with the motherboard is a standard affair, containing all the options we could possibly ask for.

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