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PHYSICAL DETAILS & LAYOUT
A board's layout is important in several regards. The positioning of components
can dictate compatibility with other products (third party heatsinks mainly)
and ease of installation. Poorly placed power connectors can also disrupt
airflow and make the system more thermally challenging.
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Layout.
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The M3A78-T has a pretty good layout without any obvious problems. All the
important connectors are out of the way at the edges of the board — power
connectors, IDE and SATA ports, though three of the five SATA ports are placed
parallel to the PCI slots. While the board has an onboard IGP, it is an ATX
board, with multiple PCI Express 16x slots for users who want to implement a
CrossFire configuration. Hybrid CrossFireX with a low-end ATI graphics card
working in tandem with the IGP is also supported.
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Another look.
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Three heatsinks help cool the board's chipsets and VRMs. The southbridge cooler
is low-profile, but broken up into many fins to maximize surface area. The northbridge
cooler has very broad fins and its overal size is impressive, though not so
tall as to interfere with most third party CPU coolers. The VRM cooler's
fins are taller than usual, making it easier to catch airflow from a typical tower
heatsink/fan.
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Back panel connectors.
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The back panel is fully-loaded with S/PDIF, HDMI, DVI, VGA, eSATA, and FireWire
ports. The only connectivity feature the M3A78-T seems to lack is Wi-Fi.
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