ASUS M4A785TD-V EVO and M4A785TD-M EVO AM3 Motherboards Review

Overclocking Results

First and foremost, if you are completely new to Phenom II overclocking we highly recommend that you check out our article on the subject, aptly titled "Hardware Canucks: Benchmarkers Guide to the Phenom II". Although it is limited to the AM2+ versions, the fundamentals remain the same as with the new Phenom II AM3 processors.

For our overclocking tests today, we’ll be sticking with our Phenom II X2 550 dual-core processor. Based upon the same silicone as the popular top-end X4 955, this chip has quite a bit of overclocking headroom in it.

Let’s see how it does in the two EVO boards.


M4A785TD-V

Maximum Core Overclock


The M4A785TD-V took our X2 550 sample to new limits. We had no difficulty achieving a maximum core clock speed of about 4036MHz for more than a 900Mhz increase. Thanks to ASUS’ great LLC implementation, vCORE values were rock solid and accurate. This certainly helped to squeeze every last MHz out of the processor. We achieved a very similar overclock with our higher-end MSI 790FX-GD70, but couldn’t quite break 4GHz with it. There is no doubt in our minds that cooling and the CPU itself are the limiting factors at this point, not the M4A785TD-V EVO.


Maximum Bus Overclock


The M4A785TD-V did not disappoint when it comes to Bus overclocking. It was able to hit an incredible 352MHz, making it an excellent board for pushing standard – i.e. not Black Edition – processors to their limits. We should note that the board had absolutely no issues posting and booting into Windows at this 352MHz mark, which is fantastic. Many boards – including higher end models – often required increases in reference clock frequency within windows to avoid post and boot-up issues.

Amazingly, with a reference clock this high, our memory was pushing beyond 700MHz using the 400MHz divider! Only a tiny boost in chipset voltage was required to reach this frequency. Beyond 352MHz, we were greeted by a pretty hard limit. Even with a 1MHz increase, Prime95 would fail almost instantly.


Maximum Memory Overclock


Unfortunately, we hit a very hard wall at about 730MHz when trying to push the memory frequency. CPU-NB voltage increases and other tweaks didn’t help and neither did reducing the NB frequency and HTT frequency. It didn’t matter if we tried 8-8-8 or 6-6-6 timings, it wouldn’t budge. This has almost nothing to do with the board, but rather the weak integrated memory controller in the CPU. We saw similar issues when testing with this processor on the MSI 790FX-GD70, as well as with another CPU on an ASUS M4A89T-E. Advertised features like 1800MHz+ memory overclocking on AM3 boards should be taken with a very large grain of salt. Socket AM3 memory overclocks are almost always severely IMC limited. Definitely avoid purchasing DDR3 2000MHz kits and other high-rated kits on AM3 platforms as they’ll never live up to their potential.

In our experience, the best strategy is to keep timings as tight as possible and reduce the memory frequency. As you can see, we were able to keep timings nice and tight at 6-6-5 while maintaining a decent clock speed. This is an unfortunate reality of AMD’s relatively new entry into the DDR3 market. We’re hoping that as the platform matures, higher memory clock speeds will become a reality.


Maximum IGP Overclock


We were extremely surprised by the massive amount of headroom in the Radeon 4200 core. At one point, we had to go and validate our results as we didn’t believe these clocks to be accurate. We managed an incredible 104% overclock, able to run the IGP at 1020MHz, up from 500MHz. To do this, we had to run a small fan over the IGP heatsink and sideport memory to counteract the significant voltage increases. The sideport memory didn’t seem to have a whole lot of headroom, but we still were able to manage a 20% boost to 1607MHz. We’ll see just what kind of improvement this overclock can bring in the benchmarking section of the review.

We should also mention that the GPU NOS application is an excellent tool. It made GPU overclocking a snap, and was completely bug and oddity free.


Overclocking Results – M4A785TD-M


Maximum CPU Core



The “M” did almost as well as the “V”, and pushed our X2 550 to the brink of 4GHz – just 37MHz shy of the “V”. This is quite an accomplishment for a compact little mATX board with half the power delivery phases.

We didn't bother doing any stability testing on system memory as once again, we were faced with the exact same 730MHz memory wall imposed by our integrated memory controller. The “M” faired exactly the same as the “V” as shown above.


Maximum Bus Clock


Once again, we were thoroughly impressed by the bus overclocking capability of these boards. The "M" was able to acheive the exact same 352MHz clock that the "V" did. This is very impressive - especially for an mATX board.


Maximum IGP Clock


We saw a pretty different scenario when it comes to IGP clocking on the “M”. For some odd reason, ASUS decided to use a different brand of DDR3, and as a result, it overclocks like crazy. We literally maxed out the slider to 2000MHz. Very nice! Unfortunately though, we weren’t as lucky on the GPU core as we were with the “V”. It tops out a bit beyond 800MHz even with increased voltage. The limitation could be thermal in nature, as the “M” employs a much smaller chipset cooler, but this sort of thing is always “luck of the draw”. None the less, this is still a huge improvement over the default 500/1333MHz.