If planning on building a new system, a motherboard with USB 3.0 is likely to have a longer life cycle, however. While USB 3.0 slots are so far by no means necessary, and with a plethora of USB 2.0 peripherals to choose from, the USB functionality on this motherboard should be fine. The Asus M4A88T-M has 9 USB 2.0 slots but no USB 3.0 slots. The Asus M4A88T-M does not support multiple graphics cards via Nvidia SLI or AMD Crossfire. This means it is perfectly capable of accommodating the latest graphics cards, although it is important to try and use a graphics card with the same graphics card interface of PCIe v2.x, as anything below will not reach the motherboard's potential, and anything above will have its performance slashed to the bandwidth maximum of the Asus M4A88T-M's PCIe v2.x. There are 1 PCIe x16 slots on this motherboard.

Integrated graphics are a cheap alternative to using a graphics card, but should be avoided when frequently using modern applications or games that require intense graphical processing. This allows for integrated graphics when paired with a compatible CPU that supports them. The Asus M4A88T-M supports onboard graphics. SATA 2.0 is a very common standard, and despite the emergence of SATA 3.0 - whose potential is difficult to reach currently - SATA 2.0 remains a viable option. These allow for data speeds of up to 3GB/s. The Asus M4A88T-M has 6 SATA 2.0 hard drive slots.

Its size comes at the cost of features, so there are likely to be far fewer connections and expansion options available than in a larger motherboard. The Micro-ATX Asus M4A88T-M should fit into all ATX cases, but its smaller size allows you to downsize your system build as a whole. It uses the DDR3 memory type, with maximum speeds of up to 1866 MHz, and 4 DDR3 slots allowing for a maximum total of 16 GB RAM.

Any compatible AMD CPU will have the same socket entry.

The Asus M4A88T-M uses the AMD Socket AM3 CPU socket.

Asus m4a88t m internal graphics