Product Showcase
The ECS A990FXM-A
Right, here we have the motherboard which can be recognized by an updated look and feel design wise, a nearly impossible to differentiate layout and a common feature set. That's a nice looking motherboard alright. The focus of this motherboard is that it has a dark looking design whilst remaining competitive with pricing.
We dig the two tone (black/grey/white) design but feel that too many white colored components are used. Go black ECS, go black especially with your 'Black Extreme Edition' motherboards, dark colored PCBs are the trend these days. What immediately catches the eye are the sheer looks and heatsinks sitting on top of the chipset. The board has lots of features which we'll walk you through in a minute.
We received the final retail sample and as such it comes packed with a quite decent product bundle. Among the gear inside the kit you'll find the following: the Motherboard, 2-way SLI bridges and a Crossfire bridge, I/O Shield, SATA 6G cables, Quick connector kit, Manual and Driver CD. A nice inclusion is a USB 3.0 bracket which you can mount in a 3.5" bay/slot.
The extras you need to seek in the overall design and components usage, which is notable all by itself when you peek at the motherboard for the first time. let's have a look at the motherboard features.
Notable features include 8x SATA connections, USB 2.0 internal headers, 6x PCIe x16 slots, Rear IO connectivity:
- 1 x PS/2 keyboard/mouse combo port
- 1 x Clear_CMOS button
- 1 x Bluetooth
- 8 x USB 2.0 ports
- 2 x RJ45 LAN connectors
- 2 x eSATA 6.0Gb/s ports
- 2 x USB 3.0 ports compatible with both USB 3.0/2.0 devices (blue)
- 1 x Audio port (Line-in, Line-out, Mic-in)
- 1 x optical S/PDIF Out connector
Then there's a legacy PCI slot. The mobo has DDR3 2133(OC)/1866/1600/1333/1066 MHz support straight out of the BIOS. We spot socket AM3+, and also quality capacitors and solid core chokes.
Audio is managed by the Realtek ALC892 codec which supports High Definition audio up-to 7.1 channels.
