ECS A780 GM-A Ultra Motherboard

The latest ECS motherboard is based on the AMD 780G chipset and includes

integrated ATI Radeon HD3200 graphics IGP, with AMD Hybrid Graphics technology

and DirectX 10 capabilities. The AM2+ socket means that it is compatible with

Phenom Quad core processors. The motherboard also boasts of HyperTransport 3.0

and can therefore provide bandwidth of up to 20.8 GB/s resulting in higher

computing efficiency.

Enthusiasts and gamers can even overclock the motherboard by adjusting the

voltage, ratio and frequency of different cores to get optimum performance. The

ATI Hybrid graphics technology enables you to get better gaming experience by

adding a separate graphics card along with the on board graphics. Other features

on the device include HDMI out, Gigabit LAN, eight channel high definition audio

output and SPDIF out. We tested the motherboard using the new power-packed

Phenom II X4 940 processor with 2 GB DDR 2 RAM. Running Windows XP SP3 was a 320

GB HDD along with an additional NVIDIA GeForce 9600GTX (and without it). On PC

Mark 05 and 3D Mark 06, scores obtained were amazing: 8765 (7052 without

dedicated graphics)and 12149 (1384) respectively. On POV-Ray the render averaged

67,650 (60884) PPS which is decent. The motherboard managed to give great

performance on CineBench with a score of 9709 (9065) when rendering with all

four cores.

Bottomline: An ideal mix of performance and features at an affordable

price.