Bearing in mind that I had never even heard of J&W prior to this review, I feel that the RS780UVD motherboard performed fairly well. It certainly has all the right components for a micro ATX board, with a whopping six SATA ports, four DIMM slots, the onboard 3200 graphics with its own dedicated SidePort memory and passive cooling sinks covering all the toasty bits, it's a wonder they've managed to squeeze it all on there. The appearance as a whole is quite tasteful, with a blue/black/white color scheme that blends nicely together. Personally I am not a big fan of ATI chipsets however, and the RS780UVD had a few quirks in comparison to other boards I've used.

The BIOS, while easy enough to navigate and figure out where the important settings are, has no auto-recovery feature built in. Therefore you'll be clearing the CMOS on every failed boot if you opt to play around with overclocking or make a change that the system doesn't like. Likewise there is no user settings save option, so you'll be forced to readjust every setting manually any time the BIOS is cleared. After the first few times of doing this I sure was wishing for that functionality! I also found the apparent 270Mhz ceiling a bit disappointing, this processor certainly has more in it if the reference clock was capable of going any higher. I also have another, slightly older 690G board, and it is able to reach 320+ on the bus. Finally the lack of support for 125W TDP processors is somewhat of a let-down, but not uncommon for many micro ATX boards in this category.

The price on the RS780UVD is certainly attractive, available for just under $75 over at Geeks.com, one of a very few places you can get a J&W board in North America. Compared to what other brand 780G's with SidePort are going for, that's a relative steal. If you are in the market for a good overall performing 780G board and aren't concerned as much with an extreme amount of overclocking, J&W may have just what you're looking for.

Thanks to Geeks.com for sending over the J&W RS780UVD-AM2+ motherboard for review.