ECS A890GXM-A review

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On the next few pages we'll show you some photos. The images were taken at high-resolution and then cropped and scaled down. The camera used was a Canon 450D 12 MegaPixel.

Okay then, let's start off with the box shot so you know what to look for in your local computer shop.

Alright, let's take a look at the product. Here we have the entire bundle. The product is to be positioned in the 100~125 USD market. Next to the motherboard you'll receive the back plate, driver CD, SATA cables and well, that's pretty much it.

As you can see this is an ATX motherboard with integrated Radeon series 4 graphics. We also spot three x16 PCIe slots for CrossfireX graphics. When all are used simultaneously your PCIe lane configuration will be split up as 8x:8x:4x.

There's also two x1 PCie slots, and one traditional PCI slot.  That's very nice connectivity. Oh and the overall looks are very nice in a black color scheme. This is a good looking board alright.

So here we have the back panel I/O connectivity. We lack a PS2 mouse connector but have one D-Sub (VGA), DVI, HDMI and Display port connector (great connectivity!). We see (and I love this) an optical TOSLINK sound output, a total of six USB 2.0 ports 1x eSATA (6G), firewire, two Gigabit Ethernet LAN connector and then the 8.1 channels of Analog audio as well. Also, the little red button is  clear CMOS button. Should you need it, it would prevent opening up the chassis and use jumpers etc. I like the location.

The embedded Radeon HD 4290 on the Northbridge is HDMI 1.3 compliant, so it also supports higher bandwidth and greater color depth for future video standards. The onboard audio for the motherboard is provided by a Realtek ALC892 CODEC. This is a fully High Definition Audio 1.0 compliant CODEC that supports ten DAC channels that can split into 8 Channel Front Panel Audio simultaneous output.

When we flip the board 90 degrees counter clockwise we look at socket AM3, and also see quality Japanese capacitors and good solid core chokes hidden under the massive passive cooler. And finally (for ECS) there's an 8-pin CPU fan header positioned really well. We like the 8-pin CPU power header. When overclocking the processor we can easily draw much more current. So that little extra is certainly nice.