One of the boards that is going to hit in the media centre for being a small well-rounder 785G chipset, don’t expect itself to be a gaming black edition motherboard. But that what ECS elite-group did with the new 785G board from AMD. So the black edition is a new elite group of the newer socket AM3 configuration and the first chip to fully support a fixe frequency 1333MHz DDR3 memory and also a DDR2 1066MHz memory frequency, so there is a mix and match of high end memory and cheap alternative, which AMD never had in the past year, or so.
The ECS A785m-M Black edition is a micro-ATX form factor, very odd for a gaming motherboard, but with the advantages of having the flexibility of a small media player case enclosure and still able to fit most task at hand, whether it is video playback or playing left 4 dead, this can be an option for most AMD makers. The new addition to the 785G chipset is the RS880 integrated graphics chip. ATI dubs this chip the Radeon HD 4200. In terms of their discrete graphics chips this is basically half a HD 4350 so the naming scheme makes sense. The HD 4200 has 4 ROPs (Render Output Unit), 8 Texture Address units, and 8 Texture Filter units at a 500MHz clock speed. The additions of DirectX 10.1 and UVD 2.0 are the only changes between this chip and the previous 780G chipset.
EJiffy is a new addition to ECS motherboards. It is a Linux based interface for fast booting the computer without booting into Windows. You can install eJiffy on a HDD and after 8 seconds after the computer boots up eJiffy is ready to provide web browsing, photo reviewing and online chat. This is very similar in concept to Express Gate, and offers an alternative if you can’t boot into Windows and avoids virus attacks. The eJiffy utility comes on its own CD.
Overall the board, find itself in between, a hybrid ASUS motherboard with a copy cat of a express gate series , that is also based in the Linux OS database, but also capable of being really cheap for the general market, only $100US. So the micro- ATX form factor, with a combination of high capacitors and ferret chokes, is improved by the previous series from ECS. But of the features and ports in the motherboards cramped in the small factor, so ECS, have to cut some excessive ports like another PCIEX, so only hybrid crossfire is only viable in this system, but overall the placed and locations of specific ports are generally in good positions and enough to fit your needs.
ECS’s board is a great fit for the Home Theater PC user that wants a quiet system with no fans besides the CPU cooler. The board has all of the features that you would want from a HTPC motherboard including HDMI, DVI-D and VGA ports on the back panel. The inclusion of the ALC888S audio CODEC and integrated HD 4200 graphics means that lossless Blu-Ray playback is possible with this motherboard without an additional graphics card. Performance is on par with the other 785G motherboards on the market, and the board is available online for under $100 making it a good choice for those wanting an inexpensive single video card system.