ECS GF8200A Black Motherboard Review :: ECS GeForce 8200A Black Layout

The board is an ATX board meaning that it can fit into virtually any normal case, with some ITX cases and mini-PC cases being the exception to this rule as it is designed for standard ATX cases. There is a single PCI Express Generation 2.0 x 16 slots with two PCI Express x1 slots and three PCI slots on the board. Integrated graphics boards generally do not have two or more PCI Express x16 slots for SLI operation.

PCI-E x16 Slots

SATA Ports

Black Ed. Logo

Rear

Serial ATA (SATA) drives have almost totally replaced Ultra DMA 133 hard disks and optical disks for storage and removable media. The GeForce 8200A Black Edition has 5 SATA ports on the board, on the bottom half of the board next to the SysFan header. To the left of the fan header is a power and Reset button, meaning that the end-user can turn on/off his computer without it being in a box with cables.

24-Pin

4-Pin

DIMM Slot

FDD Port

The 24-pin power connector is on the bottom of the board next to the IDE port on the right hand side and below the CPU area. The small size of the board dictates that some areas of the board are a little hard to have perfect placement of every component. The 8-pin power connector is on the top of the board. The Northbridge has a Black Series logo on the heatsink.

CPU Area

Power/Reset

CPU Area

USB Headers

The CPU area is relatively clear of obstacles, allowing for after-market cooling solutions to be used on the motherboard. The GeForce 8200A can take any of the current AMD CPUs including the Phenom X4 9850 we now use for our AMD motherboard platform. That’s one advantage of the AMD platform in that every CPU on the same platform can be used on older motherboards. Of course, using an older motherboard means that slower DDR2 memory is supported, or HT2.0, but at least they’ll work.

The NVIDIA GeForce 8200A Black motherboard from ECS has four DIMM Sockets for up to 8GB of DDR2-1066MHz memory. The memory controller on AMD platforms is on the CPU itself so the memory supported is dependent on the CPU and not all AMD CPUs support DDR2-1066MHz. Dual Channel memory is supported by using two adjacent DIMM Sockets i.e. 1,2 3,4 or 1,2,3,4.

Onboard Audio

F-Audio Pins

Sys Fan

Power Fan

The onboard audio is made by IDT 92HD206, a new audio CODEC for me as this is the first motherboard I’ve seen with this. The 206 is an 8 channel solution meaning that you can have 7.1 audio or 5.1 audio with a separate 2 channel audio stream. One interesting thing about this board is that it does not have a SPDIF connection meaning that the HTPC enthusiast might miss it.

Rear I/O

In terms of rear IO, the ECS 8200A Black has a PS/2 Mouse and PS/2 Keyboard port, VGA output, a HDMI connection, 6 USB connections, an external SATA port, a RJ45 jack for the Gigabit LAN and 6 jacks for the onboard audio. Note the aforementioned lack of SPDIF ports. Another interesting omission is the lack of a DVI port. Most monitors today sport either a HDMI port or a DVI port. To run DVI you need an adapter which is not included in the bundle.

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