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ECS A770M-A AMD 770 chipset mainboard Review Conclusion
Bluetooth 16 Nov 2007

Conclusion

ECS puts up a good fight with the higher end chipset 790FX in the single card comparison. In terms of performance, we don't see much differences if you intend to use a single graphics card on it.

As we have seen, ECS is making the A770M-A the entry level board for PCIe Gen 2 based on the AMD 770 chipset. Although the board looks plain in the packaging, the board does come with some good features which will serve most of the purposes.  The board comes with 3 PCI, 1 PCIe x16 and 2 PCIe x1 slots, 7.1ch audio codec, GbE controller chip and a Jmicron supporting the eSATA at the back panel.  I particularly like the way the 4 USB ports are stacked up and the placement of eSATA port by doing away the old parallel port.

 

There aren't much overclocking options available in the BIOS. Other than providing a large range for the CPU Freq and some voltage options, the BIOS basically looks incomplete with the lack of a CPU multiplier. I would have been able to achieve a higher overclocking if I would be able to adjust the CPU multiplier upwards from 13x to 16x for the X2 5000+. In our test, we can only run the CPU Freq up to 250MHz with the default multiplier of 13x. That gives us an overclock from 2.6GHz to 3.25GHz on the X2 5000+ Black edition. Click here to see BIOS Screen shots.

When it comes to packaging, we never expected too much from ECS. Other than the manual, it is just the CDROM, a SATA cable and IDE cable. I wonder what should I do if I needed more USB ports and LPT1 port. The brackets are not provided. On another note, the colour documentation is a plus, black and white manuals are simply not enough to illustrate installation procedure.

Overall, if you don't intend to use CrossFire X, this board is a value for money. The real pity is the lack of multiplier option, otherwise this board would be a real good buy for pairing up Phenom processors.

Discuss

Pros

  • eSATA
  • 4 USB ports in a column
  • GbE
  • PCIe Gen 2

Cons

  • Passive cooled; chipsets are a bit too hot
  • BIOS is too restrictive with no options like multiplier control
  • Relatively cheap

Ratings

Here are my ratings out of 10.

 Category

Score
 Performance

9 / 10
 Features

8 / 10
 Ease Of Installation

8 / 10

 Overclocking Features

6 / 10
 Documentation

8 / 10
 Packaging

7 / 10
 Cost / Performance

9 / 10
 Overall Rating :

7.8 / 10

 

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