ECS GF8200A black edition mainboard review - 1 - A black introduction

ECS GF8200A black edition mainboard review
Info: ECS
SKU: GF8200A
Price: $79.99 USD / 69 EUR

It never ceases to amaze me how much fun the more budget oriented products can be. Recently we reviewed ECSes AMD 780G chipset based mainboard, feature-packed for a very small price. It offers just so much fun for the money spent on it. Yet we figured, that's based on an AMD chipset based solution, and NVIDIA recently released their GF8200 based mainboards. So why not grab a Phenom processor, some memory and the ECS GF8200A mainboard and see where we end up? And I'll tell you in advance ... for this kind of money, this little mainboard again is amazing for the price.

See, this 70 USD/EUR mainboard comes with Hybrid graphics, (integrated GeForce 8200), 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 70 bucks! That's just electrifying. 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 even media VC-1/h.264 decoding for you (Blu-ray / HD-DVD). This is just a very cheap alternative.

The mainboard is based on the AMD-oriented chipset NVIDIA MCP78S including a GeForce 8-class DirectX 10, Shader Model 4.0 graphics engine, it's also capable of driving a PCI Express 2.0 graphics card connected via the chipset's 16 PCIe 2.0 lanes. In addition to Hybrid SLI, the MCP78S will support Socket AM2 and AM2+ CPUs over a 2600MT/s HyperTransport 3.0 bus. It will also handle six 3Gb/s SATA drives, 12 USB ports and Gigabit Ethernet.

For the more mainstream gamers, surely the integrated graphics core is below par. 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.

Good stuff for sure. So today we'll peek at that GF8200A mainboard from ECS. It's in fact for that money even the 'Black edition' and comes with some extra features & nice stylish black design.

Let's have a look.