ASUS' M4A785TD-V EVO motherboard is a worthy implementation of the AMD 785G chipset, which in turn is a refinement of the original AMD 780G chipset, a long-time favorite around the PCSTATS offices. The AMD 785G chipset introduces the Radeon HD 4200 IGP which is DirectX 10.1 and Shader Model 4.1 compatible. This means it's compatible with pretty much every game on the market, as well as being able to run all of the cool new graphics features in Microsoft Windows 7. It also improves hardware acceleration of desktop applications through ATI Stream and better compatibility for Unified Video Decoder 2.0.

We found that the performance of the Radeon HD 4200 IGP hasn't improved noticeably compared to that of the Radeon HD 3200 IGP, so today's 3D games still aren't playable over IGP graphics. If you are interested in gaming, do yourself a favour and pick up a mainstream videocard.

The real strength of the Radeon HD 4200 comes from better support for hardware-accelerated HD video decoding and improvements to ATI Stream, which lets the IGP do desktop processing for certain graphically intensive applications, like Adobe Acrobat reader. The ASUS M4A785TD-V EVO has a solid feature set that's on par with Intel and NVIDIA's mainstream motherboards, and beats out pretty much anything else in its class.