ECS A790GXM-A Black Review :: ECS A790GXM-BIOS

The ECS A790GXM-A Black Edition uses an American Megatrends Incorporated AMIBIOS for their BIOS program. This is a popular BIOS program used by every major motherboard company second only to the Phoenix Award BIOS in usage around the world. The main menu is split up into Standard CMOS Setup, Advanced Setup, Advanced Chipset Setup, Integrated Peripherals, Power Management Setup, PCI/PnP Setup, PC Health Status, and Motherboard Intelligent BIOS or M.I.B.

The Standard CMOS Setup has the Date and Time Setup areas. Here is also where the IDE and SATA drives on the system are detected. Advanced Setup is where the HyperTransport Frequency and CPU features like Virtualization, C&Q, and C1E are enabled. Here is also where you set the Boot Device Priority as well the HDDs, Removable Drives and CD-DVD drives.

The majority of overclocking is done in the Motherboard Intelligent BIOS menu. The GPU clock can be set from 150MHz to 2000MHz (Don't try this at home LOL) in 1 MHz increments. The Base Clock can be set from 200-355MHz in 5MHz increments. This is rather disappointing form a high-end enthusiast but acceptable for the mid-range hardware buyer looking at this board as finer control over the Base Clock may get an extra MHz or 2 overclocks. CPU Voltage can be set +0.20V to +0.300V in +0.020 increments. Memory Voltage can be set from +0.010V-+0.150V in +0.10V increments. NB Voltage can be set +0.005V-+0.75V in 0.005V increments. SB Voltage can be set from 1.8-2.1V in 0.1V increments.

Overclocking any CPU is a hit and miss affair on any motherboard. I was able to get a stable 15% overclock on our Phenom X4 9850 CPU without crashing issues by increasing the base clock to 230MHz from the 200MHz default. This offered a clock of 2.875GHz on the 2.5GHz default clock of the CPU. Using ATI's ACC was necessary to reach this level.

BIOS Shots