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ASUS M3A 770 Socket AM2+ 8 channel audio ATX Motherboard
- £39.27ex vat
- £46.15inc vat
Need it fast? You have:
Tuesday, 9th September.
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- manufacturer #: M3A
- quickfind code: 139890
- 47 in stock for next day delivery.
12 reviews
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Product Reviews
Great motherboard, bad lan drivers
os:
Windows Vistahey all, great motherboard, and brilliant delivery from ebuyer, as usual.
brilliant build, as usual from ASUS, plenty of cables
came with SATA connectors, 1 normall and 1 right-angled.
a BLACK IDE cable imprinted with ASUS, looks great in my case with a modular power supply.
and of course, the sticker for the case :D
system specs
ASUS M3A 770
AMD PHENOM 9750
2GB XMS2 DDR2 800MHZ 4-4-4-12
nvidia 8800GT 512MB OCed (temporary)
650W modular power supply
samsung 20x DVD-RW duel-layer
500GB maxtor 32MB cache HDD
and an X-Clio propellor case, 36CM side fan
all from Ebuyer, great service. great products.
i only experneinced 2 problems
1) needed a bios update STRAIGHT away for the AMD 9750 phenom. THANKFULLY not a problem as i had a 4800+ on hand. and its only 2/3 days old that processor so, it cant be helped that the bios needed to be updated, not there fault in any-way
2) LAN DRIVERS! my god, that was torture to resolve, hopefully asus will bring out some better drivers soon. but this was mad to fix, but im glad it is fixed. i had to un-plug the ethernet cable, and re-set the CMOS battery in order for the drivers to install, never had todo such an odd thing for it to install. and the cmos battery fix was a last-resort as i thought that least likely.
but i still give it 5 stars even after the hours of troubleshooting
Excellent Motherboard
os:
Windows XPI just bought this board as i am building a new system. Ordered parts from ebuyer. The motherboard is excellent, with easy settings for overclocking. I am using amd64 5000 Black Edition.
I have overclocked it to 3.2 Mhz.
The only downside is that the board is a bit small for a Atx. But, overall a excellent motherboard. Also it supports the Corsair 2GB PC2-6400 XMS2 Part: TWIN2X2048-6400 memory.
Cracking
os:
Windows VistaWhat can I say. I bought it, I installed it and the 6400+, no issues with LAN drivers on the current BIOS, no issues with Vista 64 Bit, however, I would recommend turning off driver signing and installing the ATI North and South Bridge drivers they up your performance just a little :)
Lan driver
Just built a system on this board and had no problems with the lan driver
g
os:
Windows XPGot this as part of a new build. It's a pretty decent board for the price, but the NB does get really hot even @ stock speeds. Apart from that, it seems to O/C well, and recognised my CPU/RAM on first boot. Did upgrade to latest BIOS tho, because it wouldn't pick my RAM up at the correct speed. After BIOS flash, everything was great! Overall, a great budget board.
My PC
MoBO: Asus M3A
CPU: AMD 64 6000+ (Stock Cooling)
RAM: Kingston Hyperex (2BG) @800mhz (4/4/4/12)
GPU: POV 8800GT EXO edition
PSU: Hiper 580W
HDD: 1x 80GB IDE & 1X 250GB SATA
Optical Drives: 1x IDE TEAC CDRW & 1X SATA Sony DVD/RAM Burner
GREAT MOBO
os:
Windows VistaTHIS MOBO IS SUPPORTED FOR 9500 AND 9600 PHENOM CORES SO THERE IS NO PROBLEM WITH COMPATABILITY. I HAD SOME PROBLEMS WITH THE HARD DRIVES AT THE BEGINING BUT WHEN I GOT THE RAID DRIVERS OFF THE MOBO DRVER CD ONTO A FLOPPY IT RECOGNISED THE RAID AND INSTALLED WINDOWS.
MY BUILD,
APLUS EL DIABLO CASE
ASUS M3A AMD 770 SOCKET AM2+
9500 AMD QUAD CORE AM2+
4GB RAM DDR 2 800
8800GTS 512MB G92
2 WD 250GB RAID 0 (460GB)
IM GIVING IT 4 STARS FOR CONFUSION
BIOS UPDATE NEEDED
The Asus M3A LAN driver has problems when run with the factory BIOS (version 0301) that causes major problems, sometimes the operating system will not even load up due to this problem.
To fix the problem, do the following: -
-------
TO UNINSTALL THE ORIGINAL LAN DRIVER
- If you have installed the original LAN driver then boot the PC in Safe Mode.
- Go into Device Manager and un-install the original LAN driver or restore your system using system restore.
- Continue with the below steps.
-------
PROBLEM FIX
- Using a working PC (a friend's or library's), download from the Asus support website the following:-
1) The latest Asus LAN driver (version 2.4.7.10 or above).
2) The latest M3A BIOS file.
3) The latest Asus Update program.
- Save them to a USB drive / floppy disk / CD.
- Boot the problem PC in normal mode.
- Windows may detect the LAN, but DON'T install any drivers for it yet.
- Install The Asus Update program from the files you downloaded earlier.
- Using The Asus Update program, update your BIOS using the BIOS file you downloaded earlier.
- Reboot.
- Install the LAN driver that you downloaded earlier.
- Do a Windows Update making sure you choose any updated LAN files.
- Windows update will download and install any newer LAN driver automatically.
Enjoy your working LAN
P.S. Apart from the above problem I quite like the motherboard, I've stayed with Asus for years now as they usually don't let me down.
Atheros Lan causes XP to freeze
os:
Windows XPJust put a system together with this mobo and everything was fine until i came to install the lan driver. it would hang during installation and when you restart using the reset switch it hangs at the windows logo screen!
the only way to sort this out is to go into safe mode and uninstall it then it boots normally.
everything will be ok that is if you can live without the onboard lan!
looked at asus forums and it seems i am not the only one with the problem.
Asus answer to it was to download and install the latest lan driver but guess what it is still the same!
other than this minor problem its a pretty good mobo.
does anyone else have a similar experience with this motherboard?
Troublesome to sert up but worth it
I recently built a system based on this mobo with a Phenom X3 8450 and 4Gb OCZ DDR2 pc2-8500.
I had a few issues, listed with solutions below.
1. Processor was not recognised correctly by the BIOS causing windows install to hang. The Asus web site has a list of supported processors and the minimum BIOS rev required, check this and flash accordingly.
2. System kept locking up randomly during windows install. This was down to the memory timings, there is a BIOS option for overclocking which defaults to auto, change this to normal.
3. The onboard NIC also may have caused some problems, I disabled this until windows was installed and then enabled it and installed the latest drivers from the Asus web site, not the ones supplied, which did not work.
System is now up and running great, using a 400GB Hitachi SATA II and an MSI 7900GTO GPU , getting 80+ FPS from HL3 Epi2 at 1280x1024 with everything maxed out.
3 stars because of the faffing around required to set it up, otherwise would have been 4.
Watch out for onboard sound drivers
The RealTek High Definition Audio Driver won't install and disables any PCI soundcard you may have. This page shows some of the problems and a possible solution to getting the onboard sound working:
http://www.driverheaven.net/audio-general-technical-discussion/142385-hd-audio-asus-p5k.html
but I just disabled the onboard sound in the BIOS and my X-Fi card miracuously reappeared and when reenabled worked fine.
