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 .AMDs 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.
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