ECS A790GXM-A Black Review :: ECS A790GXM Layout

The CPU socket on the A790GXM-A Black Edition is located below the Northbridge and MOSFET heatsink. There's plenty of space to install an after-market CPU cooler on the board as the CPU area is clear of obstacles. The A790GXM-A Black has a Socket AM2+ interface meaning that Hyper Transport 3.0 is fully supported on the Phenom CPUs. One thing that is a good change from the 780G chipset is the ability to run 140W TDP CPUs like the Phenom X4 9950 that was recently released.

In terms of expansion slots, the A790GXM-A Black Edition comes with two PCI Express x16 Generation 2 slots for the video cards. You can install up to two ATI HD 4870 X2 cards for true CrossFireX capability with this motherboard or two HD 4870s for that matter. The board also supports Hybrid Crossfire which allows a HD 3450 to pair with the HD 3300 integrated graphics to improve gaming performance. There is a 128MB memory chip to support Side Port memory that allows the RAM to be used in conjunction with memory on the board.

The other expansion slots on the board are two PCI Express x1 slots, and two older PCI slots for legacy devices. There's also a Molex connector on the board for stability when two video cards are installed in the slots. The memory sockets consist of four DIMM sockets for up to 16GB of DDR2-1066MHz memory (assuming the CPU supports that memory speed.)

Hard drive support is provided by six SATA ports on the board, the maximum that the SB 750 Southbridge supports natively. RAID 0, 1, 5, and 10 are supported by the SB 750 chipset but I've had numerous issues with enabling RAID 0 on AMD boards for years and this one was no different. Due to the issues I had to run tests in single drive mode.

ECS outfits this board with the Realtek ALC888 CODEC which features 8-channel audio support. Unfortunately support for 8 channels audio is only present with use of the SPDIF port that's onboard. The ALC888 is a popular audio CODEC that features a SNR output of 97dB and a 90dB input SNR with up to a 192 KHz sampling rate.

Onboard LAN on the board is controlled by two Realtek RTL8111C PHYs which are connected to the SB750 chip through single PCI Express x1 lanes. This eliminates the bottleneck of the PCI bus which can be flooded with data when Gigabit Ethernet is fully utilized. Teaming is not supported by the dual LAN controllers and would have been a nice addition.

ECS decided to put three USB headers bringing up the fact that the SB750 supports up to 12 USB devices natively. There is an empty header on the board for Firewire, but as most devices are USB compliant this is not a big negative. ECS uses Ferrite Chokes and RDS (on) MOSFETS just like the higher priced boards from some of their competitors.

The IO area of the board is rather unique due to the addition of the HD 3300 integrated graphics core. The IO area has one mouse, one keyboard PS/2 port, VGA output, Serial Port (rather have another external SATA port here), six USB 2.0 ports, HDMI output, two Gigabit Ethernet ports, 5.1 Channel analog audio outputs and optical SPDIF output. The lack of an external SATA port is the only thing that is missing from the IO on the board.