Review Conclusion
of
ECS A780GM-A Ultra AMD
780G+SB750 Mainboard Review
Bluetooth 2 Dec 2008
Conclusion
We have seen many AMD 780G/SB700 and AMD
790GX/SB750 board reviews in year 2008. Although the 780G seems an aged chipset,
pairing it up with SB750 brings a new life to it.
The ECS A780GM-A Ultra is probably by so far the
only board that pairs up these north south bridges. On top of that, it uses a 4
mosfet per phase design that is capable of supporting processors which when
overclock requires higher stability.
The board A780GM-A Ultra has an integrated ATI™ Radeon HD3200 graphics
IGP, which includes AMD Hybrid CrossfireX technology and DirectX 10
capabilities. In addition the motherboard features convenient Multimedia HDMI
capabilities, while supporting eSATA, 6x Sata ports, with RAID 0, 0+1, & 5
configurations using SB750, There are also PCI-E x1, 3 PCI as well as a
RealTek ALC888 7.1CH High Definition audio, Gigabit Lan and proprietary ECS BIOS
tweaking through the M.I.B Overclocking utility or using the AMD Overdrive
utility. Unfortunately, the board does not come with a 2nd full length PCIe 2.0
slot or 128M of Side port memory.
In terms of performance, this board is slower than the AMD 790GX boards as it's
GPU is clocked at 500MHz by default. We would not be surprise that it will
perform on par with a AMD 790GX board with Sideport disabled if both runs at the
same clock speed. In fact, in our tests, when this board clocks it's GPU to
1GHz, it is able to take on a AMD 790GX at 700MHz with Sideport enabled.
As for CPU overclocking, the BIOS comes with a wide
range of options including memory timing, voltages, wide range of HTT etc. See gallery
for more information. As it uses the SB750 (SB) of the board is the
Embedded Controller for AMD OverDrive- Advanced Clock Calibration. With that,
we can run AMD Overdrive to overclock the CPU cores by adding a 4% increase in
all the 4 cores through this option below. We were able to o/c it to 250MHz
x11= 2.75GHz with the voltages bumped up as shown below.
In conclusion, ECS has created something with an interesting pair
of chipsets. It would be more appropriate if these feature sets comes in the
form of a mATX board instead of a full ATX. The missing Sideport, 1394 and 2nd
full length slot (not officially supported by chipset) would have made this
board more flexible. It will not just be a integrated board but a CrossFire
enabled board.
Discuss
Pros
- Excellent Image quality
- Low CPU Utilization when playing back VC-1
- D-SUB, HDMI interface
- eSATA
- Hybrid CrossFire
- Power On/Off Switches
Cons
- Single PCIe slot
- FullATX
- No 1394
Ratings
Here are my ratings out of 10.
|
Category |
Score |
|
Performance |
7 / 10 |
|
Features |
9
/ 10 |
|
Ease Of Installation |
10 / 10 |
|
Overclocking Features |
8 / 10 |
|
Documentation |
7 / 10 |
|
Packaging |
7 / 10 |
|
Cost / Performance |
10 / 10 |
|
Overall Rating : |
8.2 / 10 |
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