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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Bundle and BIOS
Looking at the design of the box reminds me of the show "Merlin." I love the dragon and the coloring used.
The back of the box is very informative as it gives all kinds of data about the board, its capabilities and the included features.
The bundle is getting very thin in these boxes. It seems like that is a re-occurring statement, but it is still true. They are not putting as much in the box as they used to.
The AMI Bios is what drives the board. As you can see, this is the typical setup that we have gotten used to with ECS boards. It is easy to navigate and has lots of tweaks available. Let's take a close look at several of the pages to see what all is included.
The Standard Setup page... not much here!
The Advanced Setup page has a few settings that may interest the end user. You can set up Cool & Quiet here, as well as set the boot device order. This is also where you enable or disable eJiffy.
The Advanced Chipset page gives options for video card and HDMI audio options.
Controlling your LAN, USB, and SATA drives is accomplished on the Integrated Peripherals page.
The PC Health page gives us a good amount of information with which to monitor the system. Temperatures, fan speeds, and voltages are all seen here.
The M.I.B. page is where the majority of tweaks are to be made on the ECS A890GXM-A motherboard. There are several great things to use on this page that will help you get the most out of your system.
The Memory Configuration page allows us to have control over our DDR3 timings. This is the top part of the page...
...and this is the bottom of the page. As you can see, it shows the current timings at the bottom of the page as a reference for you.
Available DDR3 speeds are DDR3 800, 1066, 1333 and 1600MHz.
There is quite the assortment of HT frequency settings as well as you can see from the picture.
CPU/HT reference goes all the way up to 500MHz, which is way overkill!
Setting the CPU frequency control to manual opens up some other options, such as vcore and CPU multiplier.
CPU voltage can be set up to 1.55v. That is not very high, but you do have further options in the BIOS settings to tweak it even more.
Here are the other tweaks for CPU Voltage. You can up the set voltage (as show in pic above) anywhere from +50mV up to +500mV. That gives some pretty decent room for overclocking.
vDimm can be set as high as +630mV over default voltage.
NB/HT voltage has a ceiling increase of +310mV.
The Southbridge can be tweaked all the way up to +310mV.
Sideport voltage has options from 1.5v to 1.75v.
Next Page - Test Setup
| 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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