ECS A790GXM-A Review

ajmatson - November 16, 2008
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Testing:

To put the ECS A790GXM-A to the test I will be running a series of scientific and video benchmarks which will push this motherboard to its limits. I will then compare the board against two other 790GX boards, the Foxconn A7DA-S and the MSI DKA 790GX Platinum to see how it stands up among boards from other manufactures based on the same chipset. To keep any variables from interfering with the scores and comparisons all of the boards will be run with the same hardware setup and everything will be set at their stock speeds, timings, and voltages unless noted in the overclocking section.

Test Setup:

Processor: AMD Phenom 9850 "Black Box" (200x12.5)
Motherboard: ECS A790GXM-A
Memory: Mushkin Redline XP2 8000 2 x 2 GB 5-5-5-12
Video Card: PowerColor Radeon HD 4850 w/ Catalyst 8.8
Power Supply: Mushkin 800w Modular Power Supply
Hard Drive: Seagate 7200.11 1TB SATA
Optical Drive: Lite-On 8x DVD+/-RW
OS: Windows Vista Ultimate Edition

Comparison Motherboards:

Comparison Motherboard 1: Foxconn A7DA-S
Comparison Motherboard 2: MSI DKA 790GX Platinum

Overclocking:

Overclocked settings:

Processor: AMD Phenom 9850 "Black Box" @ 200x16 = 3.200GHz
Memory: Mushkin Redline XP2 8000 2 x 2 GB 5-5-5-15 @ 800MHz

Overclocking the ECS board is quite easy using the Motherboard Inteligent BIOS on the ECS A790GXM-A. All of the options you need to change are right there in front of you. The thing is that when overclocking this board you might have a problem with a processor that does not have an unlocked multiplier. No matter what I did and how much I pushed the boards voltages and tweaked the settings it would not boot and remain stable over 200MHz. Pushing the multiplier on the Phenom X4 9850 to 16x gave me a 700MHz overclock but that was it. I could not get anything else out of this one so that is where the overclocked tests will be run at 3.2GHz (200x16).