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ECS looks to continue its success of their "Black Series" motherboards in the form of the A790GXM-A ... featuring an onboard Radeon HD 3300

ECS have enjoyed some success with their "Black Series" of motherboards, which they introduced earlier this year. It's aimed and targeted at the higher-end of the mainstream market which, according to ECS, is the market that they want to capture. So what makes these "Black Series" motherboards so special? Well, ECS have included some features normally found on higher-end enthusiast motherboards. These include solid capacitors, internal power-on and reset switches and an overclocking BIOS.

No longer are ECS classed as low-end, budget motherboard manufacturers ... having already conquered that market, ECS looks to expand into other areas and capture new market sectors. The mainstream to high-end is a very lucrative but highly competitive market ... but there's also a new and emerging market in netbooks. Yes, we've already seen a prototype from ECS at the Computex this year ... we will be seeing a lot more products from ECS this year, you can be sure of that!

In this review we'll be taking a look at the ECS A790GXM-A Motherboard, which features AMD's 790GX IGP Northbridge and SB750 Southbridge. It's designed with gamers in mind, and it's aimed at the mainstream market. It offers support for all AM2/AM2+ processors including AMD's Quad Core Phenoms, there's also support for DDR2-1066 ram, Hybrid graphics and CrossfireX. What's more it has built-in HDMI and 15-pin D-Sub for onboard graphics ... giving you DX10, HD video and audio.

According to AMD/ATI, the performance of the onboard integrated graphics is equivalent to a Radeon HD 3300. This means, as far as onboard graphics is concerned, this could be the world's fastest motherboard GPU. Other benefits include the support for Hybrid graphics engine ... boosting overall graphics performance.

In addition to all of this, the ECS A790GXM-A uses something called "Side Port Memory" which is basically 128Mb of additional memory integrated onto the motherboard. The BIOS allows you to select 3 options for onboard graphics ... UMA (uses system memory), SIDEPORT (uses onboard memory) or UMA+SIDEPORT, which is a combination of both. For the overclocker, there's even options to increase the clock speeds of the SIDEPORT memory and GPU core.

My initial first impression on the ECS A790GXM-A is pretty good so far. It contains a lot of features and I expect the performance to be not too bad either. Remember, this mothrboard is aimed at the mainstream market so we can't expect too much ... and the onboard graphics should perform accordingly and produce results similar to its predecessor ... the 780G.

We'll be testing the ECS A790GXM-A with an AMD Quad Core Phenom ES @ default 2.6Ghz, Kingston HyperX DDR2 PC2-9200 2Gb Kit, a MSI Radeon HD4850 512MB DDR4, PC Power & Cooling Turbo Cool 860W PSU and a 24" Samsung SyncMaster 245B LCD monitor. Windows Vista with native DX10 was used as our OS.

Ok, let's not waste any more time and take a closer look at the specifications of the ECS A790GXM-A Motherboard.