ECS A990FXM-A Motherboard

On-Board Peripherals

The AMD 990FX chipset is a two-chip solution. The south bridge chip is an SB950 chip, which is a renamed SB850. This chip supports six SATA-600 ports, supporting RAID (0, 1, 5 and 10). These ports are located on the motherboard edge rotated 90°, so video cards won’t block them.

Figure 4: SATA-600 ports

The ECS A990FXM-A has two eSATA-600 ports controlled by a Marvell 88SE9128 chip, supporting RAID (0 and 1), and one ATA-133 port, controlled by another Marvell 88SE9128 chip. There is no floppy disk drive controller.

This motherboard has 12 USB 2.0 ports, eight soldered on the rear panel and four available through two headers located on the motherboard. It also has four USB 3.0 ports, controlled by two ASMedia ASM1042 chips. Two ports are located on the motherboard rear panel, and two are located on a front panel header.

The portrayed motherboard doesn’t have FireWire ports.

This motherboard supports 7.1+2 audio format, i.e., eight channels plus two independent channels for audio streaming. On this motherboard, the audio is generated by the chipset using a Realtek ALC892 codec. The specifications for this chip include 97 dB signal-to-noise ratio for the analog outputs, 90 dB signal-to-noise ratio for the analog inputs, up to 192 kHz sampling rate for both inputs and outputs, and 24-bit resolution. These specifications are good for the mainstream user, but if you are looking into working professionally with audio editing, you should look for a motherboard that provides an SNR of at least 97 dB for the analog input.

The ECS A990FXM-A comes with an optical SPDIF output, but the analog connectors are independent only if you install a 5.1 analog speaker set; if you install a 7.1 analog speaker set you will have to use either the “line in” or the “mic in” jacks. You can add a coaxial SPDIF output or route digital audio to your video card to have digital audio in the HDMI connector using the available “SPDIFO” header.

This motherboard has two Gigabit Ethernet ports, controlled by two Realtek RTL8111E chips. It also has a Bluetooth receiver.

In Figure 5, you can see the motherboard rear panel, with external clear CMOS button, PS/2 keyboard and mouse shared connector, eight USB 2.0 ports, two eSATA-600 ports, Bluetooth receiver, two Gigabit Ethernet ports, two USB 3.0 ports (blue connectors), optical SPDIF output, and shared analog 7.1 audio outputs.

Figure 5: Motherboard rear panel