ECS A790GXM-A Black Series Motherboard Review

The Motherboard (Cont’d)

As you could see on the first page, the chipset supports six SATA-300 ports and all are present on the reviewed board, supporting RAID levels 0, 1, 5 and 10 – RAID5 is a new feature for AMD/ATI chipsets.

This motherboard has an eight-channel on-board audio but provides analog jacks for only six channels, so full eight-channel support is only available through digital connection (SPDIF). This motherboard, on the other hand, provides one optical SPDIF (digital audio) output.

The audio codec used is Realtek ALC888, which features a 97 dB output signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and a 90 dB input signal-to-noise ratio, with 24-bit resolution and up to 192 kHz sampling rate for its outputs and up to 96 kHz sampling rate for its inputs. While these specs are excellent to the mainstream user, people working professionally with analog audio capture and editing will be better off with a different motherboard or will have to buy an add-on sound card.

This motherboard also features two Gigabit Ethernet ports, each one controlled by an individual Realtek RTL8111C chip. Each controller is connected to the south bridge chip through individual PCI Express x1 lanes, which is perfect, as this configuration won’t limit the performance of your Gigabit Ethernet ports (controllers connected to the system using the regular PCI bus can face a bottleneck – i.e., may not be able to achieve the maximum Gigabit Ethernet performance).

In Figure 4, you can see the rear panel of the motherboard. There you will find one mouse PS/2 connector, one keyboard PS/2 connector, VGA output, serial port, six USB 2.0 ports, HDMI output, two Gigabit Ethernet ports, 5.1 channel analog audio outputs and optical SPDIF output. As you can see there is no parallel port on the rear of the motherboard.

Figure 4: Rear connectors.

This motherboard also provides other smaller yet important features. Like other members from ECS’ “Black Series” the voltage regulator circuit uses ferrite chokes (which present a lower power loss compared to the iron chokes traditionally used on this circuit) and solid aluminum capacitors (which prevent the infamous capacitor leakage problem), plus it has passive heatsinks on top of the MOSFET transistors. Also most of the capacitors used on the rest of the motherboard are also solid, which is great. The caps that aren’t solid are from OST, a Taiwanese company.

Figure 5: Voltage regulator circuit featuring ferrite chokes, solid capacitors and passive heatsink.

Another nice feature is the presence of the power and reset switches soldered directly on the motherboard, see Figure 6.

Figure 6: Power and reset switches.

Before going to our benchmarking, let’s recap the main features from this motherboard.