Legit Reviews

As you can see, the ECS 890GXM-A motherboard was able to pull down some decent numbers.  We tested the board by comparing the performance of the integrated graphics solution to a dedicated graphics solution using the Gigabyte Radeon HD5670 video card that we reviewed not too long ago.  We also were able to run the benchmarks on the ASRock 880G Extreme3 that we will soon be reviewing here at LR.

We had results that were pretty much dead even when testing the system in areas that did not benefit from the added graphics card.  Tests like Sandra and Cinebench 11.5 saw absolutely no difference in performance.  There is no doubt that adding a graphics card to the system boosts your performance in gaming, though. We saw huge increases in our scores when adding the $100 card to the system. Between the two different chipsets, each board took turns taking jabs at the other throughout the testing.  The ECS A890GXM-A outperformed the ASRock board in the Sandra Memory and the Cinebench 11.5 benchmarks.  The ASRock did make a strong showing in the PCMark testing, as it outperformed the ECS board in all but two of the tests.  Even though we said outperformed, there really is very little performance difference seen in the results.  It would really be hard to declare a winner here.

Overall, the moral of these results would be: if you are gaming, you will need to add a dedicated card to the system to see any playability in modern games. That is nothing new.  Also, there is very little difference in the performance between the two different chipsets represented here.  It all comes down to price and the features that you want on a board.  Performance is very good on both boards.