This is another black edition from ECS to make a real change in the gaming market, for having a cheap and affordable board prize but not sacrificing little or not at all performance and features in most popular Intel and AMD chipsets. For now the AMD’s 790GX is being the new product range for the black series of ECS. For the ECS having the same ego of ABIT and Asrock, go for cheap and affordable board prize but having premium features and abilities of most major board manufactures add in. As for example; Asrock having the same way, by adding and onboard Wi-Fi wireless connection to most of their boards, to compete with ASUS’s own Deluxe version of boards, with the lower prize being the difference between them.
ECS A790GXM-A Black Edition board having the same black PCB colour as rest of the Black edition boards, The A790GXM-A, as the name suggest, it’s AMD’s 790GX integrated chipset, having the HD3300 integrated graphics and dedicated 512MB of memory in the bottom of that imposing Aluminium heatsink. As in the chipset features a support of HDMI decoding and streaming, being a great option for a home theatre system AMD is, can in some terms can be capable to most games in medium resolution and detail (and overclockable too!). ECS also providing ferrite chokes with solid capacitors, for a precise voltage to the CPU, speaking of capacitors, when you look at the bottom, you see with its short comings, with the old electrolyte capacitors in front of the two bottom PCI slots, doesn’t look much, but it would have been good with only about three solid capacitors in each rather than the old ones to give it a tick on features. Plus the placement of the four pin CPU socket, such a far reach of the PSU in where areas that you want to have a good airflow in the system. For the rest is well done in the department with the placement of most peripherals one HDMI and VGA port, enough space for an after-market cooler and the prize when it comes into stores of about $195 at least.
The performance of the ECS 790GX, with the rest from the 790GX chipsets, having about 5fsp difference with the OEM board on unreal tournament III, but for the encoding, in close inspection, hardly have any difference between all of the 790GX we have, having only 1-3sec between them. Only the best of the brands, like Gigabyte, acquiring the best speed and bandwidth in between Asrock, ECS and the others. Much of the AMD’s use with the newer 790GX over the 790FX is a great choice, having the option of hybrid crossfire, when needed, and also much cheaper in chipset features and performance. ECS A790GXM-A is a far cheaper option for an AMD platform but still with some short comings, but when taken out of the equation, this can be a good home theatre system for the prize and performance.
