ECS 'Black Series' A780GM-A mainboard
Info: ECS
SKU: A780GMA
Price: $74.99 USD / 199 EUR

Okay granted, usually I'm not the one to get excited about budget integrated mainboards. But at the CeBIT AMD announced their 780G chipset, and for the first time in history I was pretty excited about the technology.

ECS prior to launch shipped out a mainboard from that "Hybrid" series of AMD chipsets, and quite frankly .. this is exciting stuff. Not for the uber high-end gaming audience, no .. for the people that like to play games, make a HTPC or just want to be a little greener with their PC in terms of power consumption.

The AMD 780G series of chipset is the new Hybrid technology. Keywords, good performance versus an integrated energy efficient platform for an affordable price. And it's exactly like that. ECS shipped us their  "Black Series" A780GM-A mainboard. It is sincerely loaded with hip features. To name a few:

Hybrid graphics, (integrated Radeon X2600), VGA output, HDMI output, HD audio integrated, Gigabit Ethernet, PCI-Express 2.0, Serial ATA (RAID 0,1,10) DDR2 memory up-to 1066 MHz and all that for a price hovering at roughly 80 EUR ! And that's exciting. Say you want to build a HTPC capable of  decoding 1080P Blu-Ray. Well, purchase this mainboard, slap some memory on it and get a budget processor. Because the integrated graphics core will handle the HDMI and decoding for you. See this is just a very cheap alternative.

But also for the mainstream gamers, surely the integrated graphics core is average. But if you want more, you can plug in a card at the x16 PCIe port and get yourself a pretty decent gaming rig for very little money. And when you are not using that secondary graphics card, it's saving power as you go back to the integrated graphics core.

AMD’s latest addition is the 780G/780V chipset, a product that will replace their 690G/690V product family. A chipset with a completely new Northbridge, and a slightly revised SB700 south-bridge chip.

In addition to releasing the low-power 55nm RS780 chipset AMD has also brought forward another energy efficient pile 'o transistors under the name of Athlon X2 4850e. We'll take a look at that one as well.