ECS A790GXM-A Black Series Motherboard Review

Overall Performance: PCMark Vantage

The new PCMark Vantage program simulates the use of real-world applications and gives scores for the following categories:

• PCMark
• Memories
• TV and Movies
• Gaming
• Music
• Communications
• Productivity
• HDD

For a detailed description of each one of these tests, please download and read the PCMark Vantage Reviewer’s Guide.

You can see the results for each category below. We are not going to compare the results for the Memories and HDD suites.

This benchmarking was done using the motherboard on-board video. Usually the motherboard with the fastest graphics engine achieves the highest score on this program. See the results below.

Here we got some very interesting results. AMD 790GX and AMD 780G achieved the same performance on Music and Communications benchmarks, with Sapphire PI-AM2RS780G (AMD 780G) being a little bit faster than ECS A790GXM-A Black Series (AMD 790GX) on the final PCMark score (5%) and on the TV and Movies benchmark (8%). However, on Gaming and Productivity benchmarks ECS A790GXM-A Black Series was 7% and 23% faster, respectively. This huge difference on Productivity is probably showing that AMD 790GX has a higher 2D video performance than AMD 780G.

Compared to ECS GF8200A Black Series (NVIDIA GeForce 8200), the reviewed board was 28% faster in Gaming, showing that AMD 790GX has a better 3D engine than GeForce 8200, 18% faster in Productivity, 6% faster in Music and a 7% higher overall score. Both motherboards achieved the same performance under TV and Movies and Communications.