AMD 785G Motherboard Roundup Review - PAGE 6

Closer Look:

The ECS Black Series boards have a unique look. On the black PCB are yellow, orange and red slots. Compared to the other boards, it has two PCI-E x1 slots and only one legacy PCI slot. I prefer this over the inverse since PCI devices are slowly disappearing. There are already many motherboards without any of these slots.

The back of the board is much more brown than black, but that will not be seen when installed in a case. A plastic backplate with steel nuts has been used.

It uses a P8 CPU power connector. There is a massive heatsink over the voltage regulators. Everything was kept very cool during testing. Beside the DDR3 memory slots is the other power connector. There is also an IDE connector for those who want to keep their older drives, but the floppy disk drive connector has disappeared. Who would use such a device anyway when today we have 128GB USB thumb drives?

The six SATA connections controlled by the SB710 are onboard. The usual front panel connectors are also located in this corner of the board, except for the speaker which is soldered direclty onto the board. One great thing is the onboard power and reset buttons, which can be very useful when having an open-air setup. The third button is the CMOS clear, in case the overclocking goes wrong. The header above the reset button concerns the BIOS programmation and thus the end-user has nothing to do with it. Another header, this time for a fan, is located below the SATA slots. The display shows at which stage the motherboard is in the post and boot process, but sincerely it is not much useful since we are not provided with the meaning of each code.

Two other internal USB ports are located farther on the left, for a total of three. There is also a header for the Firewire, the front audio jacks and the SPDIF out. Another fan header can be found right above the first PCI-E x1 slot.

The I/O panel of the A785GM-M is different than the other boards. First of all, it has only five analog audio connectors, but an 8-channel only requires four jacks. All five plugs including the microphone in and line in can be configured to any device, so the 785GM-M can manage a 7.1 analog setup without any problems. It also has two eSATA connectors. Since there are already six onboard SATA connectors, these are provided by the JMicron JMB362 controller. Finally, ECS took the decision to not put the old PS/2 port in there.

Bundled with the board are four SATA cables which is more than the other boards we took a look at. There is also an IDE cable, an I/O shield, two guides and a driver CD. The blue CD is for installing eJIFFY, a Linux-based small operating system meant to provide instant access to web, music and online chat without booting into Windows

Now that we have examined all five motherboards, let's get to testing!