AMD 780G & Athlon X2 4850e (ECS A780GM-A) - 2 - ECS A780GM-A mainboard

The ECS A780GM-A mainboard - AMD790G

ECS recently started a new line in their product line-up of mainboard, The "Black Series" is targeted slightly more at you guys, feature packed mainboards, nice design, black PCB and decent overclocking options. All that with an affordable price tag in mind.

When I first opened up the packaging I didn't know this was the 780G based chipset (hey products come and go each day here). The first glimpse was, that looks like an enthusiast board. The black PCB and colorful design are eye-catching, then I noticed the HDMI connector. Pretty cool, and when I checked the sales price ... I was .. no way. This thing is three times cheaper than a similar Intel integrated graphics solution, yet much faster as well.

The A780GM-A is ECS Black Series platform based on the best combination of the new 55nm AMD 780G and SB700 chipset .AMD’s aim with this chipset is to offer a way better competing product to the NVIDIA GeForce 8200, yet more significantly to supply a platform solution that competes directly against that big Blue colored Giant, Intel's G31/33/35 products.

Most importantly is of course that integrated graphics unit. The focus of the platform obviously goes to multimedia and some decent gaming capabilities. AMD achieves that by integrating a Radeon HD 3200 graphics core into the chipset, which is running on a 500MHz core clock & 40 Shader processors. For the freaks, the HD 3200 is in fact the Radeon 2400 series (RV610), yet slightly tweaked and optimized. Memory wise, all graphics memory is shared with system memory with the ability to access up to 512MB memory.

Now gaming wise this is not much at all, but the best thing about this integrated GPU is that AMD integrated their Unified Video Decoder 2.0 (UVD 2.0) capabilities into the 780G, and that's golden as UVD 2.0 offers hardware acceleration for decoding VC-1, H.264 (AVC), WMV, and MPEG-2 sources up to 1080p resolutions. Even advanced de-interlacing is available but you do need a Phenom processor for that option.

The A780GM-A offers support for the reasonably priced Phenom quad core processors up to HT 5200 MT/s with Hyper Transport 3.0 technology. Interesting enough, it also offers support for DDR2 1066, but since the memory controller is built in the AMD processors, you will be dependant on the actual CPU. With a Phenom you can though. For a run of the mill AM2(+) processor (yes this mainboard takes these as well .. you'd revert to DDR2-800 MHz though.

When we look at the Southbridge chip (SB700) we also see some changes opposed to the previous generation product because that chip had a few shortcomings. New, six SATA 3.0Gb/s ports, up from four on the SB600. SATA drives can be set up in RAID 0, 1, or 10 - though this is "fake-raid" and uses CPU cycles. though if you integrate 6 SATA ports ... why is RAID 5 not supported ? Two arrays would have been possible here.

Another good improvement is the augmentation of USB 2.0 performance and the number of ports available. The controller is now dual-channel controller and can serve 12 USB 2.0 capable ports and if memory serves me right two specific 1.1 ports for backwards compatibility.

When we land at audio we also have nothing to complain about; we see a High Definition Audio controller that allows up to 16 channels of audio output per stream. The controller supports up sample rates up to 192kHz and up to 32-bits per sample.

Now the best part yet .. when both chipsets are in idle .. they consume 1.5 Watt of power and at load just 15W. That's just amazing.

Let's have a look at some of the complete feature set of the ECS A780GM-A.

CPU AMD Phenom™ processor (Socket AM2+) AMD Athlon™ 64 X2 Dual Core/ Athlon™ 64 / Sempron processor High-performance HyperTransport 3.0 CPU Interface Support transfer rate of 5200/2000/1600/1200 mega-transfers per second

CHIPSET AMD® 780G & AMD® SB700 North Bridge: AMD® 780G South Bridge: AMD® SB700

GRAPHICS On Chip (AMD 780G-based with ATI™ Radeon HD3200 graphics) Integrated DirectX10 graphics processor

MEMORY Dual-channel DDR2 800 memory architecture 4 x 240-pin DDR2 DIMM socket support up to 32GB* Support DDR2 1066/800/667/533/400 DDR2 SDRAM * (Due to the DRAM maximum size is 2GB at present, the memory maximum size we have tested is 8GB)

EXPANSION SLOT 1 x PCI Express x16 slot 2 x PCI Express x1 slots 3 x PCI slots

STORAGE Support by AMD SB700    2 x Ultra DMA133/100/66 devices    5 x Serial ATA 3.0Gb/s devices    RAID0, RAID1, RAID10 configuration

AUDIO Compliant with HD audio specification IDT 92HD206 8-channel audio CODEC

LAN ATHEROS L1 Gigabit Fast Ethernet NIC

REAR PANEL I/O 1 x PS/2 keyboard & PS/2 mouse connectors 1 x External SATA port 6 x USB ports 1 x Gigabit Ethernet Port 1 x Audio port (Line-in, Line-out, Mic-in) 1 x VGA port 1X HDMI Port

INTERNAL I/O CONNECTORS & HEADERS 1 x FDD connector 5 x Serial ATA connectors 1 x 24-pin ATX Power Supply connector 1 x 4-pin ATX 12V connector CPUFAN/PWRFAN/SYSFAN connectors 1 x IDE connector 1 x Speaker header 1 x Front panel switch/LED header 1 x Front panel audio header 1 x SPDIF out header 1 x CD in header 3 x USB 2.0 headers support additional 6 USB ports 1 x COM1 header

SYSTEM BIOS AMI BIOS with 8Mb SPI ROM Supports Plug and Play, STR/STD, Hardware monitor, Multi Boot, DMI,HDCP Supports ACPI revision 3.0 specification