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Asus M4A88T-M Motherboard Review

Rating: 8.0.

We have recently looked at two impressive AMD motherboards from Asus which performed well in our tests and offered great feature sets and build quality. Today we are going to look at the M4A88T-M motherboard which offers a similar feature set to the other two boards we've tested but in a micro-ATX form factor.

The most significant feature that the  M4A88T-M lacks compared to the other boards is USB 3.0 support.  There is a USB 3.0 version of the board available but we have the non-USB3.0 version here to review.

Specification

CPU AMD socket AM3 for AMD Phenom II /
Athlon II / Sempron 11 series Processors (up to 140W)
Chipset AMD 880G / SB710
Memory 4x DIMM, max. 16GB, DDR3 1866
(O.C.) / 1333 / 1066 MHz, ECC and non-ECC, un-buffered memory
Storage -1x Ultra DMA 133/100/66 Connector

-6x SATA 3GB/s ports with RAID 0, 1, 10 and JBOD

Expansion
Slots
-1x PCIe 2.0 x16 slots

-2x PCIe 2.0 x1 slots

-1x PCI slots

Audio -8-channel High Definition Audio
CODEC

-Optical S/PDIF output at back panel

LAN Realtek Gigabit LAN controller
featuring AI NET 2
I/O
(back panel)
-1x PS/2 Keyboard/Mouse Combo port

-1x DVI

-1x D-Sub

-1x HDMI

-1x S/PDIF Out (optical)

-1x RJ45 port

-6x USB 2.0/1.1

-6x 3.5mm Audio connectors

Form
Factor
Micro ATX

Like the other two AMD motherboards from Asus we've looked at recently, the M4A88T-M is supplied in a lime green box that only differs in size from the other two.  The front is decorated with various different logos which elude to some of the boards' features.  Turning the box over reveals more detail about the features and specifications of the board inside.

Inside the box we find all the accessories we would usually expect.  These include two SATA cables, a selection of installation manuals, an IDE cable and a software CD.  We were a little disappointed not to find a ‘Q-connector' in the box like the other two motherboards as this made installation a lot more hassle free.

Like the other two boards we've looked at, the M4A88TM uses a blue and black colour scheme which looks great.  As a result of the more compact form factor, Asus have compromised on the number of PCI and PCI Express lanes that are included.

There is one PCI Express x16 slot so you can install the graphics card of your choice, unless you plan to use the on-board Radeon HD 4250 GPU.  As there is only one full size PCI Express lane, CrossfireX isn't support although Hybrid CrossfireX is supported with the on-board GPU.  The Radeon HD 4250 is part of the 880G chipset that Asus have used.

Asus have also included 2x PCI Express 1x slots for further expansion even though one of these will be blocked if you install a dual slot graphics card.  There is also a legacy PCI slot which would be perfect for installing a TV tuner if you plan to build an HTPC with this board.

The voltage regulation circuitry surrounding the CPU socket is bare of any heatsinks so it's clear that Asus aren't expecting extreme overclockers to use this board.  The four DDR3 Ram slots flank the CPU socket on the other side and support 1333Mhz Ram (1866MHz OC).  Please bear in mind that large CPU coolers will hang over the RAM slots so low profile RAM is a good idea.

We also find 6 SATA 3Gbps connectors in the bottom right hand corner which face directly out of the board.  We would have preferred SATA 6Gbps connectors that were angled at 90 degrees but these are features often reserved for higher end motherboards.  There is also an IDE connector along the right hand side.

There are a few connections which we feel Asus should have included on this board which are missing.  Even though USB 3.0 seems to be removing the need for eSATA ports these days, many boards still have an eSATA port and quite a few people still use them.  So we were a little surprised that Asus chose not to include one.

There are six USB2.0 ports on the rear I/O panel which should be enough for most users.  For those who require more, there are three internal headers that allow you to connect six front panel USB2.0 ports.  There is also a PS/2 connector, six 3.5mm jacks, an optical S/PDIF connection, an RJ-45 ethernet jack, a VGA port, a DVI port and an HDMI port on the rear IO.

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.

Futuremark released 3DMark Vantage, on April 28, 2008. It is a benchmark based upon DirectX 10, and therefore will only run under Windows Vista (Service Pack 1 is stated as a requirement) and Windows 7.  This is the first edition where the feature-restricted, free of charge version could not be used any number of times. 1280×1024 resolution was used with performance settings.

We noticed a decent improvement in the CPU score by overclocking the system which should enhance gaming performance in a number of games.

3DMark 11 is designed for testing DirectX 11 hardware running on Windows 7 and Windows Vista. The benchmark includes six all new benchmark tests that make extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading.

After running the tests 3DMark gives your system a score with larger numbers indicating better performance. Trusted by gamers worldwide to give accurate and unbiased results, 3DMark 11 is the best way to test DirectX 11 under game-like loads.

If you want to learn more about this benchmark, or to buy it yourself, head over to this page.

A solid set of results throughout for the Asus based system, especially the physics scores.

SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. It should provide most of the information (including undocumented) you need to know about your hardware, software and other devices whether hardware or software.  Sandra is a (girl) name of Greek origin that means “defender”, “helper of mankind”. We think that’s quite fitting.

It works along the lines of other Windows utilities, however it tries to go beyond them and show you more of what’s really going on. Giving the user the ability to draw comparisons at both a high and low-level. You can get information about the CPU, chipset, video adapter, ports, printers, sound card, memory, network, Windows internals, AGP, PCI, PCI-X, PCIe (PCI Express), database, USB, USB2, 1394/Firewire, etc.

Native ports for all major operating systems are available:

•       Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x86)

•       Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x64)

•       Windows 2003/R2, 2008/R2* (IA64)

•       Windows Mobile 5.x (ARM CE 5.01)

•       Windows Mobile 6.x (ARM CE 5.02)

All major technologies are supported and taken advantage of:

•       SMP – Multi-Processor

•       MC – Multi-Core

•       SMT/HT – Hyper-Threading

•       MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE 4.1, SSE 4.2, AVX, FMA – Multi-Media instructions

•       GPGPU, DirectX, OpenGL – Graphics

•       NUMA – Non-Uniform Memory Access

•       AMD64/EM64T/x64 – 64-bit extensions to x86

•       IA64 – Intel* Itanium 64-bit

In SiSandra we noticed large increases in every test, showing how even a moderate overclock can help performance.


Cinebench R10 has since been replaced by V11.5, but many people have a better indication of relative performance by the results from R10 – after all it has been around for years. We will however include R11.5 results on the following page. For those who don’t know Cinebench is not just a mere synthetic benchmarking application, it is based on the rendering engine from Cinema 4D.

The CPU test renders a 3D scene photo-realistically while applying performance intensive functions such as area light sources, procedural shaders, Ambient Occlusion and multi level reflections. Especially when used on faster, multi core CPU systems, MAXON CINEBENCH R10 delivers much more accurate results.

Cinebench R11.5 is the newest revision of the popular benchmark from Maxon. The test scenario uses all of your system’s processing power to render a photorealistic 3D scene (from the viral “No Keyframes” animation by AixSponza). This scene makes use of various different algorithms to stress all available processor cores.

In fact, CINEBENCH can measure systems with up to 64 processor threads. The test scene contains approximately 2,000 objects containing more than 300,000 total polygons and uses sharp and blurred reflections, area lights and shadows, procedural shaders, antialiasing, and much more. The result is given in points (pts). The higher the number, the faster your processor.

In both Cinebench R10 and R11.5, the benefit of having six cores for rendering is apparent, with large differences between the single and multi-core scores.

Super Pi is used by a huge audience, particularly to check stability when overclocking processors. If a system is able to calculate PI to the 2 millionth pace after the decimal without mistake, it is considered to be stable in regards to RAM and CPU.

There wasn't a massive improvement in this test as Super Pi is only a single threaded application and can't benefit from all six cores.

CyberLink MediaEspresso 6 is the successor to CyberLink MediaShow Espresso 5.5. With its further optimized CPU/GPU-acceleration, MediaEspresso is an even faster way to convert not only your video but also your music and image files between a wide range of popular formats.

Now you can easily playback and display your favorite movies, songs and photos not just on your on your mobile phone, iPad, PSP, Xbox, or Youtube and Facebook channels but also on the newly launched iPhone 4. Compile, convert and enjoy images and songs on any of your computing devices and enhance your videos with CyberLink’s built-in TrueTheater Technology.

New and Improved Features

  • Ultra Fast Media Conversion – With support from the Intel Core i-Series processor family, ATI Stream & NVIDIA CUDA, MediaEspresso’s Batch-Conversion function enables multiple files to be transcoded simultaneously.
  • Smart Detect Technology – MediaEspresso 6 automatically detects the type of portable device connected to the PC and selects the best multimedia profile to begin the conversion without the need for user’s intervention.
  • Direct Sync to Portable Devices – Video, audio and image files can be transferred in a few easy steps to mobile phones including those from Acer, BlackBerry, HTC, Samsung, LG, Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and Palm, as well as Sony Walkman and PSP devices.
  • Enhanced Video Quality – CyberLink TrueTheater Denoise and Lighting enables the enhancement of video quality through optical noise filters and automatic brightness adjustment.
  • Video, Music and Image File Conversion – Convert not only videos to popular formats such as AVI, MPEG, MKV, H.264/AVC, and FLV at the click of a button, but also images such as JPEG and PNG and music files like WMA, MP3 and M4A.
  • Online Sharing – Conversion to video formats used by popular social networking websites and a direct upload feature means posting videos to Facebook and YouTube has never been easier.

For our testing today we are converting a 1.1GB MKV file to Apple Mp4 format for playback on a portable device. We will also be converting a 15 track album from MP3 to M4A format. These are common procedures for many people and will give a good indication of system power.

We noticed decent improvements in the time taken to encode both audio and video files when overclocking.  This is another instance where the real world benefits of overclocking are really noticeable.

Grand Theft Auto: Episodes From Liberty City is a standalone compilation of the DLC episodes for Grand Theft Auto IV, containing both The Lost and Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony on one disc. It was released alongside the DLC release of The Ballad of Gay Tony on 29 October 2009 for the Xbox 360 and released on 13 April 2010 for Microsoft Windows and Playstation 3. It does not require a copy of Grand Theft Auto IV to play, nor is an Xbox Live or PSN account necessary (except for multiplayer).

The engine is still extremely demanding for this game – even months later for the newest hardware. The latest version changes some of the rendering calls and is used partially within the latest Max Payne engine.  We tested the game using near medium settings as displayed below.

Thanks to it's CPU intensive nature, there was a significant improvement in the average frame rate when overclocked even though the test system coped perfectly well without being overclocked.

The Asus M4A88T-M motherboard is a reasonably well featured board for the price but we would have definitely given it a higher overall rating if it supported USB3.0 and SATA 6Gbps.  Without these we can't really say that it's a great board – just a good board. The lack of these two features isn't likely to cause issue for many users, though, as USB3.0 adoption rates are still quite low and those using hard drives rather than high performance SSDs won't notice much of a performance difference.

Being a Micro-ATX motherboard, the M4A88T-M is perfect for an HTPC or compact system.  It provides a reasonable amount of overclocking headroom, despite lacking the software functionality that was present with the other two boards we looked at recently.  But the automatic 10% overclock option in the BIOS yielded and impressive performance boost compared to stock settings.

You can buy the M4A88T-M for a shade over £57 at Ebuyer.  This makes it quite good value for money but we feel it is worth the small amount extra for the USB3 version which can be purchased for £68 at Ebuyer as it will help to future proof your machine.

KitGuru says: A compact board that is reasonably well featured and good value for money.

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7 comments

  1. Thats pretty nice for under £60. overclocking with a sub 60 quid board wasnt expected.

  2. Yeah I like that product myself, bargain basement price with asus quality. I dont need USB 3.0 although SATA 6gbps would have been nice.

  3. не могу найти рабочий сервис расчета зпл на главбухе не пашет на клерке не пашет
    подкиньте плз если кто знает
    п.с. дали линки хз какая-то туфта бухгалтер калькулятор
    и открытки с днем бухгалтера

  4. nice for under £60. overclocking with a sub 60 quid board

  5. i have had this board for over 7 months and its working great, i can play a lot of pvp games without any video card, granite graphics set on low but still for a micro atx this is a nice board

  6. Can I connect PCIe 3.0 cards to Asus M4A88TM motherboard??

  7. I have been using this mobo for a while and it has been ok, but you say you used all the latest bio updates, I have looked on the Asus web site and they are from 2010. Issue I have at the moment is not booting straight away and have to manually restart (on/off).