ECS A770M-A Review

Testing:

Testing will be accomplished by running a series of benchmarks to show real world performance as well as gaming performance. Being the first AM2+ board reviewed, we will be benching against comparable an AM2 system to see if there will be any advantages moving to an AM2+ motherboard with an AM2 CPU.

Testing Setup:

• AMD Athlon64 Processor 6000+
• ECS A770M-A (BIOS dated 11/26/07, Chipset drivers provided on CD)
• Patriot Extreme Performance 2GB PC2-9200 DDR2-1150MHz
• OCZ Vendetta CPU Cooler
• PowerColor HD2600 PRO (Catalyst 7.11)
• PowerColor Theatre 550 PCIe 1x
• Antec NeoPower 650W
• 1x250GB Maxtor SATA
• 2x400GB Seagate SATA
• Apevia X-Jupiter Jr case
• Plextor PX-716SA 16X DVD RW SATA
• HL 4164B 16X DVD RW IDE
• Windows XP Professional SP2

Comparison System:

• CPU: AMD 6000+ 200 x15
• Motherboard :ECS  AMD690GM-M2
• Memory: 2 x 1GB Mushkin XP9200  5-4-4-12
• Video Card(s): Evga 8800 GTS 640MB
• Power Supply: Mushkin 650watt Modular power supply
• Hard Drive:  2 x WD 250GB 16MB cache SATA
• Opticals: Sony DVD-ROM

The important question is how well does it overclock? Unfortunately, as shown in the BIOS screen shots earlier, the A770M-A is lacking in the amount of tweaking that can be done. There were stability issues running stock when placing a full load on the system where the Northbridge, being passivly cooled, idled at 48 celcius and the Southbridge at 41 celcius. As any overclocker would do, cooling was added in the form of a 70mm fan pointed at the northbridge and a 60mm fan at the southbridge. That cleared up the issues running stock settings, but overclocking proved futile. Max stable settings that would complete the round of benchmarks are shown below.

Overclocked settings are as follows:

• Multiplier 15 (locked in BIOS)
• Bus 210
• Voltage CPU: 1.36V
• Timings 5-5-5-16
• Memory Voltage = 1.8V