ECS A790GXM-A

ECS's 790GX chipset, back in black.

We've had a look at a few ECS (also known as Elitegroup) offerings before, from its decidedly disappointing P45 motherboard to a dual-watercooled graphics card kit. That P45 board was in the same 'Black Series' as this AMD board - but is this one any better?

The most obvious sign of something being in the series is, funnily enough, that the PCB is entirely coated in a glossy black colour that makes it look extremely cool. Coupled with the red, yellow, orange and splotches of blue and pink on the board this looks really quite awesome. Throw it in a windowed case with some funky lit cooler and you'll really have something striking to show off (the Coolermaster V10 would be well-suited for this).

Based on the 790GX chipset that includes an integrated graphics core with 128MB of GDDR3 built into the motherboard, which performs roughly the same as a dehydrated marathon runner (also known as HD3300), and also has 32 PCIe 2.0 lanes. This means that you can run Crossfire at the full theoretical bus speed without any slowdown, as well as running Hybrid Crossfire to give a little extra performance or screens. Physically this chipset is located underneath the burnt copper heatsink, and the memory is located right next to it - both can be overclocked through the BIOS to give a little more performance!

Just north from the chipset is the power regulation heatsink, surrounded by three types of solid capacitors and some funky ferrite chokes. While most of the capacitors on the board are solid, there are electrolytic ones here too - these have a tendency to wear out a few years down the track and can effectively kill your mobo. Why do they use them? They're cheaper.

Still, the CPU socket has a lot of room around it and is bare of components for a good three centimetres on each side, even giving the RAM some breathing space. Each colour shows the channel, with two sticks populating the one colour to give more bandwidth just as with most AMD boards. The 24-pin power is at the edge of the board, while the 8-pin power is between the chipset and power regulation heatsinks. IDE and Floppy connectors are along the right-hand side of the board, as well as six SATA ports that are mostly accessible when running a single-slot card, though dual-slot cards will restrict access somewhat. Luckily ECS thought to include some right-angled SATA cables for just that occasion.

Hard power and reset buttons are in the bottom right-hand corner, along with all the front panel headers. USB and audio headers are along the bottom edge of the board. There's plenty of room for airflow between expansion cards, and the usual Molex connector on the board to supply an extra source of 12-volt power to aid in stability. There's no clear CMOS button, so you'll have to pull the BIOS battery out - helpfully placed right underneath where the cooler would be on a long dual-slot card. D'oh.

The back panel has the usual two PS/2, six USB, two Ethernet, HDMI, VGA, 7.1 channel audio, Optical port and for some really head-scratching reason a Serial port.

We've waded through the layout of the board, now onto the meatier chunks of interesting info - overclocking. We chucked our usual settings in of 217Mhz but hit a roadblock. Oddly this board can only be increased in 5MHz increment steps instead of the usual 1MHz, something that is very restrictive. The voltage measurements were given in the BIOS for everything except the actual CPU voltage, but we still managed to eke out a stable HTT bus of 245 on a 13x multiplier - a great overclock for a budget board.