AWESOME GAMING COMBO
- MOTHERBOARD AS BELOW
- PHENOM 2 PROCESSOR
- COOLERMASTER FAN
BUNDLE WORTH OVER R5000
The ECS AM3 motherboard
The bundle and packaging. ECS makes sure you'll receive everything you need to get started. Not a rather excessive bundle though. Drivers, cables, manual and motherboard. The extra gadgets and gizmos are left out to save on the pricing model.
The ECS A790GXM-AD3 motherboard comes with 2 PCI, 2 PCIe x16 (either 1 x PCIe x16 or 2 x PCIe x 8 for CrossFireX), 2 PCIe x1 slots. The board incorporates Realtek Ethernet (RTL 8111C) and Realtek ALC 888S 8-channel HD audio. First impression, pretty decent design. Everything is located nicely. Good color-coding.
Opposed to the DDR2 model, ECS dropped one Ethernet connector. There's plenty more to be found on the board though. Let's take a closer look.
Definitely worth a mention is a plethora of connectivity. A passive copper cooler sits on the ECS Elitegroup A790GXM-AD3 north-bridge and also nice big heatspreaders on its power circuitry (MOSFETS). Located there is a 128 MB memory module of DDR3-1333 memory. This is side-port cache used to improve integrated graphics performance. But let's zoom in and have a peek.
The mainboard's back panel shows off standard PS/2 ports. The little red switch is a CMOS CLEAR switch. Quite handy really. Then VGA and HDMI, unfortunately it's lacking a DVI output. Also a serial port, a luxurious six USB 2.0 ports, 1x eSATA, 1x Gigabit Ethernet, and then jacks for 8.1-channel connectivity.
What I just really like is the optical connector (TOSLINK), especially with HTPCs in mind. You've got everything from 2D/3D, Ethernet, and sound all integrated into one mainboard.
Insert a Phenom AM3 processor and some memory... and you're almost there, not to mention the silent passive design.
When we flip the board we can see the new AM3 socket. Mind you that AM2+ motherboards can support AM3 processors as well. Yet Socket AM3 motherboards can not support Socket AM2+ processors. Keep that in mind. The socket design and power circuitry can support processors with up to a 160 Watt TDP, so there will be no issues with even the most high-end processors.
Relocated is the 8-pin power connector. No closer to the edge of the motherboard, actually a very good location, close-by the PSU.
The board supports four unbuffered non-ECC DDR3 SDRAM DIMM sockets and up to 8 GB (tested by ECS) of memory can be installed on the board. For AM3 processors, DDR3-800/1066/1333 is supported.
Under the copper colored heatsink the SB750 (Southbridge) chip is located. It actually can support 12 USB connectors compliant with USB 2.0 from an embedded USB controller. The SB750 also supports a P-ATA IDE for one IDE port (up to 2 IDE devices) with UDMA-33, ATA-66/100/133 support from an embedded IDE controller.
The board has six S-ATA II ports with up to 300MB/s from the chipset with RAID 0,1,0+1,5 support. Though it's fake-raid (CPU based). It also has one eSATA port.
Did you spot the micro-switches already?, I just love these. Very easy if you quickly need to reset or power on the mainboard. This kind of detail I like to see in a mainboard.
Outer right view of the mainboard, here we see additional USB ports, close to the SB750 chip of course which manages them. Next to that an IDE (P-ATA) connector and, all the way to the left, internal audio connections.
The A790GXM-AD3 is outfitted with two PCI Express x1 slots (yellow), two x16 PEG slots with x8 connections (red) and two standard PCI slots (black). All of it's main connectors and headers are placed around the edges of the board, save for a band of three USB headers. There are a total of three fan headers.
