Raja and I have been working on a Holiday Guide the past couple of weeks and hopefully we will complete it this week. Our emphasis has been on finding components that offer a great bang for the buck even though they might not be the absolute best in their class. While we will offer our opinions on what is best in class, our focus has been on balanced performance, support, and features versus cost. A really good example is the ASRock X58 and P55 Extreme boards that offer a great set of features and performance for excellent pricing in each category. While they will not satisfy the needs of extreme overclockers, for the other 98% of us, they offer a really great value. Just like the Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P, MSI 790FX-GD70, and ASUS M4A77TD Pro have in their respective categories.

That said, there are a lot of great choices currently in the lower end market, especially in the AMD 785G camp. The 785G boards are just terrific values for building a SOHO centric platform that will be primarily used for office applications, Internet, communications, and casual gaming. This is especially true when paired up with an Athlon II based processor. Really, current Intel S775 processors in the sub $100 market teamed with a G41 based board just do not have what it takes to compete with the AMD products in this price sector. Intel has a competitive answer coming early next year, but until then AMD is the wise choice.

J&W is one of our favorite second tier suppliers and they have a winner in the 785G market with their new JW-A785GMT-Extreme board. This product compares very favorably with the Gigabyte and ASUS 785G offerings and actually makes for a great SFF gaming platform for those who just use a single graphics card. Our testing to date with a Phenom II X4 965BE and AMD HD 5850 leads us to believe this a great combination for the gamer centric user on a budget or as an all around gaming/media center with a HD 5770 and Athlon II X2 550BE.

The JW-A785GMT-Extreme features a great five-phase PWM design that fully supports 140W processors, Realtek ALC 888 8-channel HD audio, Realtek RTL8111D Gigabit LAN, IEEE-1394a via the JMicron JMB381 chipset, 12 USB 2.0 ports, HDMI/DVI/VGA output, 16GB DDR3 support, six SATA 3G ports via the SB710, and on-board graphics capability thanks to the update HD 4200 IG engine with full DX10.1 and UVD 2.0 support. J&W also throws in 128MB of DDR3 side port memory. There are three fan headers, with the CPU fan header having speed and temperature settings.

The layout of the board is very good and includes an LED Debug display along with power on and reset buttons.

Initial performance ranks right with the Gigabyte and ASUS 785G boards when it comes to overclocking. Our results with the 965BE were superb as the board allowed stock voltage overclocks to 3.87GHz with our GSkill Ripjaws DDR3-1600 4GB C8 kit reaching DDR3-1720 at 9-9-9-24 2T timings.

Bumping up the CPU VID to 1.43V resulted in 24/7 stable 4.07GHz clocks under Windows 7 64-bit with NB speeds at 2.86GHz, something we have not been able to do under a 64-bit operating system until now. The BIOS is geared for the overclocker with significant settings available for memory and voltage tuning. That said, memory timings are not as aggressive past 1600 as the Gigabyte or ASUS boards but this board typically clocked our CPU about 70MHz higher at like voltage settings. We will take a further look at this board in the near future but for now, anyone looking for a very high quality 785G motherboard should place the JW-A785GMT-Extreme at the top of their list.