Legit Motherboard Reviews
ECS A890GXM-A AMD 890GX Motherboard Review
| Manufacturer: | Elitegroup Computer Systems (ECS) |
| Product: | ECS A890GXM-A Motherboard |
| Date: | Thu, Sep 02, 2010 - 12:00 AM |
| Written By: | Jason Petermann - |
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Board Layout
Since its inception, I have always liked the looks of the Black series f boards from ECS. They are attractive and yet very elegant in their design. Of course, that is highly subjective. Many people prefer the "LAN Party" color style on their board. The black PCB has always been my favorite, though. As you can see, this is a very traditional layout, but it is very clean and very easy to set up. Nothing is out of place or out of the ordinary at all.
I love the heatsinks on the boards, and the "Black Series" label just ads to the overall appearance.
The top right of the ECS A890GXM-A motherboard is where we find the location of the DDR3 slots. This board supports up to 32GB of DDR3 memory in dual-channel configuration. It supports DDR3 up to 1800(OC)/1600(OC)/1333/1066 DDR3 speeds.
We also see the 24-pin power connector here, which is located right at the edge of the board, which is just perfect.
As you can see, ECS boasts all of the prowess of this board by printing the specs all over the PCB. Just above the dimm slots, you can see where ECS printed "Dual DDR3 1800(OC)."
The bottom right of the ECS A890GXM-A motherboard is the location of the AMD SB850 South Bridge, which is covered by a small aluminum heatsink. It also is where we see the BIOS chip and several USB headers.
The SATA ports are also here. This board supports five SATA III 6.0Gb/s devices, as well as Raid 0, 1, 5, and 10.
On the motherboard you will see new Power and Reset buttons in comparison to our previous boards. At time of media sample production, our provider did not have the caps for these buttons available. FYI, on the final retail version the motherboard will have these caps.
The bottom left of the ECS board is the location of our expansion slots. The A890GXM-A has three PCI Express 2.0 x16 slots, two PCI Express 2.0 x1 slots and one legacy PCI slot.
The audio chip is also located here. The ECS A890GXM-A board has the ALC892 chipset, which supports 8-channel High Def audio. The board also has the Dual Realtek 8111DL 10/100/1000 Fast Ethernet.
On the top left of the board we have the CPU socket. It is clear of anything that would hinder a larger aftermarket cooler. Our water cooler fit just fine with no issues at all. You can also see the 8-pin 24v power connector here, located at the top of the board where it should be.
Again, the heatsink looks awesome on this board, and does a great job of keeping things cool.
The back I/O ports give you many options for the type of connections you may want to make. For video we have VGA, DVI, HDMI, and display port outputs. We also have two LAN connectors, one audio port with line-in, line-out and mic-in. There is one optical S/PDIF out connector, as well as a Clear_CMOS button, and eSATA port and six USB ports. That is quite a lot!
Next Page - Bundle and BIOS
| Review Index |
|
Page 1 - The ECS A890GXM-A Motherboard
Page 2 - Board Layout Page 3 - Bundle and BIOS Page 4 - Test Setup Page 5 - Testing Results Page 6 - Power Consumption Page 7 - Overclocking Page 8 - Final Thoughts on the ECS 890GXM-A Motherboard |
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