ASUS M4A87TD/USB3 – AM3 – AMD 870 – DDR3 – USB 3.0 SATA 6 Gb/s-  ATX Motherboard

very excellent board, January 24, 2011

By 

I. thomas –

  

Like the other reviewer said it saw my 1600 ram as 1333. I had to change it in the bios. it also didn’t see my ram at first but like the instruction book told me; I held down the button next to the ram slots and restarted and the the board saw my ram. outside of those two things board works flawlessly.

my setup
this board
AMD Phenom II X4 955
G.SKILL Ripjaws DDR3 4GB 2 x 2GB
NVIDIA 460 GTX 1 gb
550 W PSU
ASUS 22in 1080p watch

I over clocked my phenom 955 to 4 GHz and I get a 7.5 on my windows experience index.

I get well over 60 frames per-second on most games at 1080p with metro 2033 being the exception I get 30 to 40 on DX11 max mode .

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Brilliant budget motherboard, December 7, 2010

I bought this motherboard to build my first notebook ever from scratch and so far it has not let me down, all is as advertised and played nicely with my AMD X4 640 processor (brilliant choice for the price). My Corsair RAM was recognized as 1333 but 2 enters in the BIOS corrected them to 1600. Has USB 3.0 and can take up to the newest 6core processors from AMD so I have a motherboard that will last for a long time.

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It’s OK, but I expected better., May 12, 2011

Bought this board to use in a groundbreaking new Win 7 build, and so far it’s doing nearly all I sought after it to. Tons of nice features and plenty of BIOS options. There is an option in the BIOS to overlock the CPU by just changing a link of settings. Or you can get really crazy and start messing with all the voltage settings if you’re so inclined. Once the OS and ASUS drivers were installed all my new hardware was recognized without any problems. I chose this board primarily because it has SATA 3 capability on all 6 SATA ports, and USB 3.0.

One thing I was very disappointed in was the RAID setup in the BIOS. One of the reasons I chose this board was for it’s RAID feature. I was planing on running RAID 1 on two of the ports, 5 and 6, but as it turns out when I enable RAID in the BIOS it activates all 6 SATA ports for RAID. Huh? Not sure how that’s supposed to work exactly when I have a single primary drive for the OS on port 1 and a Blu Ray drive on port 2. I couldn’t figure a way around this so I’m just going to install a separate RAID card, a High Point Rocket RAID 620 to control two Hitachi 2 TB SATA 3 HDDs.

By and large it’s a very excellent motherboard and I would highly recommend it, but I have to subtract a star because of the disappointing RAID feature.

My system:
ASUS M4A87TD/USB 3
AMD Phenom II X4 955 BE
Corsair Hydro H50
WD 500 GB 6 Gb/s Black HDD
Sapphire Radeon HD 6850
Four sticks (16 GB) of G. Skill Rip Jaws 1333
High Point RocketRAID 620.
Hitachi 2 TB Coolspin 6 Gb/s HDD (x2)
Corsair VX550W PSU
LG WH10LS30K 10X Blu Ray drive
NEC ND3550A DVD drive
Win 7 Home Premium and Ubuntu 11.04

Update on 07-12-11:

With using this board for a link of months now I’ve exposed another problem with it: USB 3 ports work inconsistently. I started using two external HDD enclosures with USB 3 connections about a month ago, and it seems to be hit or miss if they work. They drives worked fine at first, but now I can’t get them to work at all. I’ve tried uncommon drivers from the ASUS help site, but that just made it worse. Maybe a BIOS update would help, not sure. I’m still searching for info online to see if this is a common problem with this board. So far I’ve exposed that this board has quite a few problems. Bummer.

I’m very disappointed in this ASUS mobo. If I can’t find a solution to fix the USB 3 problem I might consider installing a PCI card with USB 3, or just scrap the mobo altogether and go with an MSI.

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