ECS 790GXM-A

We've looken at a fair share of motherboards based off AMD's 700 series chipset. Probably one of the names most hardware enthusiasts don't think of immediately is ECS but they've been trying to put out some more enthusiast geared motherboards. Today we'll be looking at one of these the 790GX based A790GXM-A motherboard. As with all 790GX motherboards currently there are no micro-ATX versions and this board is full ATX. Two 16x PCI-Express slots are there for Crossfire support, two PCI-Express slots, and two PCI slots onboard. In addition to that you have six SATA adapters, an IDE slot, 4 DDR2 1066 slots for memory expansion. The cooling should be adequate for the Northbridge and Southbridge of the ECS motherboard. You can see one unusual thing is the location of the 8-pin for CPU power. On the board you can also see USB headers in addition to a power on and reset switch onboard the motherboard next to the SATA ports. External connectors include a PS2 mouse and keyboard port, VGA cable, HDMI output, six USB 2.0 ports, dual Gigabit Ethernet, onboard HD song with digital out and a com port. We'd prefer personally to lose the com port in favor of E-SATA, Firewire, or a DVI output. A closer look at the black PCB and the coloring on the PCI slots. And here's the SB750 Southbridge on the board. The hardware bundle is the basics with four SATA cables, IDE cable, floppy cable, and I/O shield. Here are the technical specs from ECS. CPU AMD Phenom™ processor (Socket AM2+) / AMD Athlon™ 64 FX / Athlon™ 64 X2 Dual Core/ Athlon™ 64 / Sempron processor High-performance HyperTransport 3.0 CPU Interface Support transfer rate up to 5200 mega-transfers per second CHIPSET AMD® 790GX & AMD® SB750 North Bridge: AMD® 790GX South Bridge: AMD® SB750 GRAPHICS On Chip (AMD 790GX-based with ATI™ Radeon HD3300 graphics ) Integrated DirectX 10 graphics processor AMD SidePort Memory : DDR2-800 (64Mx16=128MB) MEMORY Dual-channel DDR2 memory architecture 4 x 240-pin DDR2 DIMM socket support up to 32GB Support DDR2 1066/800/667/533/400 DDR2 SDRAM * *Currently ,the memory maximum size we have tested is 8 GB(2 GB per dimm) EXPANSION SLOT 2 x PCI Express x16 slots 2 x PCI Express x1 slots 2 x PCI slots STORAGE Support by AMD SB750 6 x Serial ATAII 3.0Gb/s devices RAID0, RAID1, RAID5, RAID 10 configuration AUDIO Realtek ALC 888S supports 8-channel HD audio Compliant with HD specification LAN 2 x Realtek RTL 8111C Gigabit Fast Ethernet NIC REAR PANEL I/O 1 x PS/2 keyboard & PS/2 mouse connectors 6 x USB ports 2 x Gigabit Ethernet Port 1 x COM Port 1 x Audio port (1Line in, 4x Line out, 1 Optical SPDIF Out) 1 x VGA port 1 x HDMI Port INTERNAL I/O CONNECTORS & HEADERS 1 x 24-pin ATX Power Supply Connector & 8-pin 12V Connector 1 x 4-pin 12V Connector CPUFAN/PWRFAN/SYSFAN connectors 1 x FDD connector 1 x IDE connector 6 x Serial ATA connectors 1 x Speaker header 1 x Front panel switch/LED header 1 x Front panel audio header 1 x SPDIF out header 3 x USB 2.0 headers support additional 6 USB ports 1 x Power button/1 x Reset button SYSTEM BIOS AMI BIOS with 8Mb SPI Flash ROM Supports Plug and Play, STR/STD, Hardware monitor, Multi Boot, DMI,HDCP Supports ACPI revision 3.0 specification Support over-clocking ECS M.I.B. utility FORM FACTOR ATX Size 305mm*244mm The ECS board's BIOS is fairly easy to tweak with different settings. Not very unique features here but definitely much more than what you'd get with a typical ECS motherboard. We used an Athlon X2 4000+ and it overclocked fairly easily a couple hundred MHz. Nothing amazing but fairly good. Unfortunately we were unable to test Advanced Clock Calibration and in fact a major problem we had with the board was that none of our quad core Phenom processors were stable with this board. This of course could be a problem for people, we believe our board was just a fluke as we've seen a number of other reviews where they had no problems with Phenoms. Our Phenoms though definitely work great and have in the dozens of other Socket AM2 or AM2+ motherboard we've tested. The exact problem we're unsure of though, perhaps better quality capacitors might have helped. The X2 however we didn't encounter issues with this but it does raise some concerns of the past of ECS quality. CPU AMD Athlon X2 4000+ Memory Corsair XMS Dominator 2GB Hard Drive Western Digital 750GB Heatsink Zalmaan 9700 Display Samsung 20" LCD Our test system was Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 32-bit with Forceware 180. Due to our board's inability to run stable Phenom processors we had to run our benchmarks on an X2 4000+ we didn't have as many numbers as we would have. That said the 790GX chipset still performed well in fact we decided to see how would a plain 780G motherboard with a AMD's current best Phenom 9950 BE and our 790GX board with a much slower X2 4000+. 3DMark 2006 Default Settings ECS A790GXM-A 1456 ASRock 780FullHD 1549 Amazingly even though the 780G board boasts two more cores, a faster processor at a faster clockspeed with the 790GX it is only 100 points behind. The GPU really is more important. PC Mark Default Settings ECS A790GXM-A 4386 ASRock 780FullHD 6853 In PCMark which tests general PC performance the ECS with the much slower processor does come out quite a bit behind unlike as in 3DMark. Conclusion: The ECS board is very promising but unfortunately without getting any of our Phenom processors stable this does put some doubts in our mind and doesn't allow us to fully test the board to it's best ability. We assume since our X2 ran fine that we're probably dealing with a power issue with our particular board. Still though that does leave some doubt in the mind. That said the 790GX and SB750 combo are both good chipsets. They might start to look long in the tooth though if Nvidia can get it's GeForce 9400 out in the PC market sometime soon but as long as their tied with Apple ATI currently has the best on the market. Pricing: You can pick up the ECS 790GXM-A for $146. Score: 75%