<p>ECS A790GXM-AD3</p><p>BY: Tarek Kamal Hamdy</p><p>Intro = </p><p>The Black Series represents ECS’ high-end boards and the A790GXM-AD3 is one of the latest and is powered by AMD’s 790GX Northbridge. Is it any good? Lets find out…</p><p>Specifications:</p><p> http://www.ecsusa.com/ECSWebSite/Products/ProductsDetail.aspx? detailid=957&CategoryID=1&DetailName=Specification&MenuID=145&LanID=9 Package:</p><p>The ECS’ box art is quite striking; it features a red dragon on a black background. Inside the box we found 4x SATA cables, an IDE cable, a user manual, driver CD and an I/O back panel shield.</p><p><page_break></p><p>The motherboard:</p><p>The A790GXM-AD3 is a standard ATX board and features a dark brown PCB. The board’s PCB is covered in solid capacitors except for certain areas to the left of the PCI slots.</p><p>ECS has used huge copper heatsinks on the board’s mosfets as well as on the AMD 790GX chipset to keep them cool. The board is compatible with 140w CPUs and the CPU socket is surrounded by solid capacitors for better durability and performance. The left section of the motherboard houses 4x DDR3 DIMM sockets. These support 1333MHz modules, dual channel memory technology and up to 32GB of memory is supported. </p><p>The board’s AMD SB750 southbridge sits next to 6x SATA ports, an IDE port, 3x USB 2.0 headers, a small red power button and a yellow reset button. The board offers 2x red PCI-E x16 slots (for CrossfireX setups), 2x yellow PCI-E x1 slots and 2x black PCI slots.</p><p>The rear panel has 2x PS/2 ports, a CMOS clear button, D-SUB port, 6x USB ports, one e-SATA port , HDMI output, a RJ45 network port, S/PDIF connecter and 5x audio ports. Audio is provided by a Realtek ALC888S chipset. It supports 8 audio channels and HD audio.</p><p>The on board RJ45 port is linked to a Realtek RTL 8111C gigabit network controller.</p><p><page_break></p><p>BIOS: On power up you’re greeted by a black screen bearing the ECS and Black logos.</p><p>The main menu screen of the BIOS looks fairly standard.</p><p>‘PC Health’ section shows temperature and voltage readings for the CPU and the system. Fan speed information is also listed here. ‘M.I.B’ section contains the overclocking options. We set everything to their maximum values and then snapped a screenshot for you to see.</p><p>The ‘Memory Configuration’ section gives the user ample control over memory timings. <page_break></p><p>Testings:</p><p>Conclusions:</p><p>ECS’ A790GXM-AD3 is a great motherboard that is capable of doing almost everything. It offers decent overclocking functionality and with built-in D-SUB and HDMI, it can act as the base for a bog standard machine. Since it also features PCI-E X16 slots and supports Crossfire mode, it can be used to build a high-end gaming PC.</p><p>Running our performance test on this AM3 board with DDR3 memory in dual-channel, it returned very impressive performance scores. This is amazing if you consider that this budget board is able to outperform more expensive motherboards. It seems then that ECS built the A790GXM-AD3 so any user can pick it up and build a machine they want. </p><p>If you’re lucky enough to have a Phenom X3 CPU that is actually an X4, the board also allows you to unlock the hidden core from within the BIOS.</p><p>>>>>>>>>>> EDITOR CHOICE!!! Because price+performance+ unlocks X3 to X4<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<</p>