ECS A785GM-M Socket AM3 Motherboard

As of late, hardware has become less expensive and more efficient and so it should with more competition than ever, more brands want to be top of the food chain as it were. There are some users including the gamers and enthusiasts with cash burning a hole in their pockets that will lead them to a high-end board such as the ASUS Crosshair collection or Gigabyte UD7 motherboards but the majority of users won't believe in paying these top prices for features they will most likely not use.Thankfully motherboard manufacturer's don't just focus on the high-end market, but also on the mainstream market as well. This doesn't mean that the components are of any lesser quality, but instead it supplies the user with everything they need, and nothing that they don't. Well the folks over at Elite Computer Systems have decided to ship us one of their motherboards. The ECS A785GM-M Socket AM3 motherboard. While most of you may remark that this board is kind of old and outdated by the newest AMD 8xx series boards, it still has something to give for the budget user. Specifications[HR][/HR]CPUSocket AM3 socket for AMD Phenom II processorsSupport 125W Phenom II X6 processorsHigh-performance HyperTransport 3.0 CPU InterfaceSupport transfer rate up to 5200 mega-transfers per secondNote: This board supports CPU up to 140W TDP only; you can refer to AMD website to check your CPU.CHIPSETAMD® 785G & AMD® SB710North Bridge: AMD® 785GSouth Bridge: AMD® SB710MEMORYDual-channel DDR3 memory architecture4 x 240-pin DDR3 DIMM socket support up to 32GB per one DIMM support 8GBSupport DDR3 1333/1066/800 SDRAM*(Due to the DRAM maximum size is 4GB at present, the memory maximum size we have tested is 16GB)*(Due to AMD CPU spec limitation, please refer to Memory QVL for more information)Due to the operating system limitation, the actual memory size may be less than 4GB for the reservation for system usage under Windows® 32-bit OS.For Windows® 64-bit OS with 64-bit CPU, there is no such limitationEXPANSION SLOT1 x PCI Express x16 slot2 x PCI Express x1 slots1 x PCI slotGRAPHICSOn Chip (AMD 785G-based with ATI Radeon HD4200 graphics )Integrated DirectX10.1 graphics processorShare Memory: Maximum up to 512MBAUDIORealtek ALC 888S supports 8-channel HD audioCompliant with HD audio specificationLANRealTek 8111DL Gigabit Fast EthernetREAR PANEL I/O6 x USB 2.0 ports1 x Gigabit Ethernet Port1 x 1394a port2 x eSATA 6.0Gb/s ports1 x Audio port (1x Line in, 4x Line out, 1x Optical SPDIF Out)1 x VGA port1 x DVI connector1 x HDMI PortINTERNAL I/O CONNECTORS & HEADERS1 x 24-pin ATX Power Supply Connector & 8-pin 12V Connector1 x 8-pin ATX 12V Power Connector1 x CPU_FAN connector1 x PWR_FAN connector1 x SYS Fan header1 x IDE connector6 x Serial ATA 3Gb/s connectors1 x 7S-LED Display1 x Buzzer1 x Front panel switch/LED header1 x Front panel audio header1X Power on LED (Green light)1X Stand by LED (Red Light)1 x SPDIF out header1 x 1394a header3 x USB 2.0 headers support additional 6 USB ports1 x Power button/1 x Reset button1 x Clear CMOS buttonSTORAGESupport by AMD® SB710 2 x Ultra DMA 100/66/33 devices6 x Serial ATA 3.0Gb/s devicesRAID0, RAID1, RAID10 configurationSupport by JMicron® JMB362 2 x eSATAII 3.0Gb/s devices SYSTEM BIOSAMI BIOS with 8Mb SPI ROMSupports Plug and Play, STR/STD, Hardware monitor, Multi Boot, DMI,HDCPSupports ACPI 3.0 revisionSupport ECS M.I.B II UtilityCPU voltage adjustableMemory voltage adjustable NB Chipset Voltage AdjustableSB Chipset Voltage AdjustableHT Voltage AdjustableExternal Clock AdjustableMultiple Frequency AdjustableECS eJIFFY utility Instant access to the internet Leaves away from virus attacks under WindowsAn alternative interface when Windows crashesFREE and UPGRADABLE toolJust download the application & BIOS from ECSFORM FACTORMicro-ATX Size, 244mm*244mmPackaging and BundlePackaging[HR][/HR]The packaging is a standard shaped box for a product of this nature but features some very fancy artwork. This includes the flaming dragon that sports the bulk of the front. Lots of logos are included to make the purchaser aware of what features the board has and whether their other chosen components will be compatible. The rear of the box is as expected and has a more thorough breakdown of what the main features are and includes an illustration of the motherboard. Contents[HR][/HR]The box comes with the ordinary accessories including:Users manualSetup guideDriver and support CDeJiffy CD1 x I/O panel shield1 x IDE cable4 x Right-angled SATA cables A Closer LookThe motherboard uses the Micro ATX form factor which is becoming a big hit as of late due to the arival of AMD Fusion an the ability to include more features onto a board whilst maintaining a small form factor. The board itself sports a brown PCB with many different colours for the relevant parts of the board. This includes bright red, orange and yellow ports, slots and connectors. The socket used on this board is AM3 and supports all AM3 processors including AMD Phenom II processors, but as always we insist on updating to the boards latest BIOS for maximum processor compatibility. Phenom II X6 125W processors are also supported and includes support for 140W TDP based CPU's as well. The CPU socket features a yellow bracket for mounting your chosen heatsink/CPU cooler onto, but can be easily replaced along with the backplate that sits underneath. Memory support includes DDR3 dual channel DIMMS and allows up to 32GB DDR3 1333/1066/800 but will obviously allow more when overclocked. The board is part of the Black Series set of motherboards from ECS and this is clearly shown on the passive cooling across the board. The MOSFET/VRM area is passively cooled as well as other areas. Black Series doesn't mean a great deal barring that it means the board has the best quality and price/performance ratio. Being honest with you, it is mainly media marketing. The Northbridge is passively cooled and follows the same dark brown colour scheme as the rrest of the board. The shape of the heatsink allows for graphics cards that have a heft cooler which protrudes from the back of the card. The Southbridge follows a slightly smaller affair with a brighter, grey coloured, low profile cooler which aids in keeping the Southbridge nice and cool. The motherboard has plenty of pins, jumpers and headers including USB, front panel and much more. These are all coloured coded nicely and as always you will have to correspond with your case and motherboard manual to get them connected whereas expert users should find this easy to connect up. For the hardcore overclocker you will find two buttons for powering on and reseting your computer. These buttons are especially handy when troubleshooting or overclocking as a lot of expert users/enthusiasts don't use cases to house their systems. To assist in the overclocking challenges and mainly troubleshooting issues, there is a Debug LED system which is situated near to the CMOS battery and reset CMOS button. There are lists of codes freely available which will decipher any problems you may be faced with. Memory issues will have one set of codes whereas a graphics card problem will have another. This enables the user to reference the code with the list and find out exactly what could be causing boot problems. There are six SATA ports situated at the front of the board. Each Serial ATA port runs using a 3.0Gb/s interface and supports RAID0, RAID1 and RAID10 configurations. Your devices that connect to these ports will be using the AMD SB710 chipset. There is also an IDE port which enables older interface devices to work on this board. You can connect two Ultra DM 100/66/33 devices to this port but generally if you was buying this board, we'd expect you to have SATA devices in this day and age. This board has onboard Radeon HD4200 graphics which runs alongside the AMD 785G Northbridge chipset with a DirectX 10.1 graphics processor. It has shared memory support up to 512Mb but obviously some users will want to use a standalone solution. This board caters for the normal set of expansion cards by having a PCI Express x16 slot, two PCI Express x1 slots and a legacy PCI slot for users with older devices. The board is nothing out of the ordinary and uses a standard 24-pin ATX power connector. Also in its normal location (towards the top corner of the board) is where you will find the 4-pin power connector. The back of the board is where things really come alive as we see three different connectors for hooking a display up with. This includes a VGA port, DVI and HDMI connector. There are six USB 2.0 ports, a 1394a port, two eSATA ports, a Gigabit Ethernet LAN port (Realtek 8111DL Gigabit Fast Ethernet), an optical SPDIF out port and also five individual audio ports which use the Realtek ALC 888S 8-channel HD audio Codec. BIOSThe BIOS on this board is nothing out of the ordinary and sports the design that we've all seen on other boards in the past.Below is an example of the BIOS screen you will see on the ECS A785GM-M motherboard. Test SetupThroughout the testing phase, lots of different applications were used including gaming benchmarks and an array of synthetic tests too.These included:SiSoft SandraAIDA64ATTOHDTachPCMark Vantage3DMark 063DMark Vantage3DMark 11HyperPiWinRARCinebench R10Cinebacnh R11.5TechArp x264 HD BenchmarkWe also use other software in terms of system performance monitoring. These include CoreTemp, CPUID Hardware Monitor and SpeedFan for measuring temperatures and also Prime95 to simulate 100% load on the system's CPU.We also measure the overall power of the system using a plug-in electricity monitor, which gives us a wattage result of the complete system power draw at the plug in idle and load states.When reviewing a motherboard and completing tests, it is usually easy to compare one product to a similar one. This gives a clear indication into the performance of the test sample.Our test system remains very similar throughout all of our tests so that the results remain fair. Our test system consists of the following hardware:Test SystemProcessor (CPU)AMD Phenom II X6 1090TMotherboardECS A785GM-M Black SeriesMemory (RAM)8GB Kingston HyperX DDR3 1800MHz Graphics CardAMD Radeon HD 6850 1GBPrimary Hard DriveKingston V+ Series 64GB SSD x 2 (Raid 0)Power SupplyBFG EX Series 1200wattOperating SystemWindows 7 Professional 64-bit SiSoft SandraCPU Arithmetic shows how your processor can handle arithmetic and floating point instructions which are common in most everyday tasks. CPU Multi-Media shows how your processor can handle multi-media instructions such as image manipulation, video decoding, encoding and games. Memory bandwidth shows how fast your memory is running on the board through various tests which identify the aggregate, interger and float readings. Memory latency shows the response time of the processor cache and memory in processor clocks (how many clocks it takes for the data to be ready) and is dependent on each individual processor speed. AIDA64The memory read, write and copy tests measure the maximum bandwidth of the memory at its different phases. The benchmark supports AMD and Intel processors with the most common instructions. The memory latency test measures the delay of the CPU reading data from the system memory. The benchmark test runs a x86 instruction and only uses one core and one thread of the processor. The CPU based benchmarks focus on various different tasks including predictions, digital photo processing and data encryption. The FPU based benchmarks measure various different aspects including video compression and precision instructions. ATTO & HDTachATTO[HR][/HR]The ATTO disk benchmark tool is for measuring your storage systems performance with various different transfer sizes. We are focussing on the 1024Mb transfer. We also tested a 32GB flash drive on USB 2.0 to see what the USB controller and the performance compared. HDTach[HR][/HR]HDTach is used to show various speeds of hard drives and other storage based devices. HDTach measures the speed in MB/s to make it easy to understand and compare with your own devices.We ran the same test on the 32GB flash drive, to see how well the USB 2.0 interface was performing. PCMark VantagePCMark Vantage gives a score to show your computers performance in such tasks such as photo editing, video, music, gaming and security. 3DMark063DMark06 scores your system's 3D gaming capabilities using the DirectX 9 performance architecture. 3DMark Vantage3DMark Vantage is very similar to 3DMark06 but tests a system's 3D gaming capabilities using DirectX 10 technology. HyperPi & WinRARHyperPi[HR][/HR]HyperPi is a multi-core extended version of SuperPi, which is used to calculate pi to a specified number of digits after the decimal point. It aids in testing performance and stability of a system as well as speed when comparing to overclocking. WinRAR[HR][/HR] WinRAR is a file archiver used for compressing files and folders into zip, rar and many other storage types. It can be used to measure a systems performance as to how quickly it can compress a set of files and folders in comparison. RenderingCinebench R10[HR][/HR]Cinebench R10 is used to test a processor and graphics cards performance by rendering a 3D scene at its fastest rate. Cinebench R11.5[HR][/HR]Cinebench R11.5 is very similar tool with slightly different results as it's based on Maxon's cinema 4D software by rendering a scene at the system's fastest rate. Tech ARP x264 HD Benchmark[HR][/HR]This benchmark is used to see how fast your system can encode a short High-Definition quality video clip into a high quality x264 video file and uses the same file each time, so that it's easy to compare results. Power Consumption & TemperaturesPower Consumption[HR][/HR]For testing power consumption, we used a plug-in electricity monitor to show the overall system wattage used when at idle and at load states. This gave a clear comparison between each system. Temperatures[HR][/HR]Temperatures are always very tricky to include, as different software packages inform you of various temperatures, sometimes with a variance of up to 20 degrees between applications. We decided to stick with one and to use that as a guide. OverclockingThe board has support for the latest Phenom II processors, including the X6 1100T that we used for our tests. You may end up buying this board with a different view on running the system, as you may want to squeeze some more performance from it by overclocking.[CENTER] We overclocked this board using the settings in the BIOS as it gives the clearest way of overclocking and has always been a more trusted method than Windows based overclocking, or so we thought.This board was a funny one as after all of the tests were run, no matter what settings were put into place, the board would not clock above 800MHz. I can hear you all shouting at the screen "Cool and Quiet", but alas you are wrong as no form of heavy workload shifted it from 798.8MHz. It also seemed that no matter what settings were invested into the BIOS, nothing would change. Voltage and multiplier changes gave no real-world change whatsoever, leading us to believe that this board actually had a slight fault or that the BIOS from 2010 didn't fully support the Phenom II X6 1100T and we can only hope that ECS can rectify this for users hoping to bundle the two together.Sorry folks, but our aim at eTeknix is to be brutally honest and not to sugar coat anything. We know this may not be the result ECS are hoping for us to print, but our first hand testing doesn't lie. Final ThoughtsThe ECS A785GM-M was looking to be a favorite in our eyes, especially for users wanting decent performance with a low price tag to match. Due to its chipset, you won't be finding all of the latest and greatest features but will still see figures to rival some of the Intel equivalent boards at the same price point. If you want a board with stability even when slightly overclocked then this will be a worthwhile contender but don't expect fantastic results when trying to push your processor to the limits, but the onboard switches and Debug LEDs are a massive plus for system configuration errors and changes.Being an mATX form factor means this board is quite versitle when it comes to housing it inside a chassis and the colour scheme used along with passive cooling system and solid capacitors clearly shows that this board hasn't been overlooked or skimped on.Personally we feel this board would be aimed more at the mainstream market or be perfect for HTPC purposes. If you are hoping to buy a cheap processor and clock it to its limits, then take a look at something else.Pros:Black SeriesSupport for the latest AM3 processorsIntegrated graphicsGood passive cooling solutionCons:Not the most heard of brand in the UKClose heatsink clearanceBIOS lacks featuresBIOS showed a lot of problemsWe would like to thank ECS for supplying this sample. 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