ECS Elitegroup A780GM- A

For AMD fans, particularly gamers, it is time to feel upbeat as a

budget-range motherboard with the performance of a premium-segment device is

here. It has support for AMD Phenom processor>, HD Audio and Video, and is Direct X10 compatible. This board even

supports HDCP, Hybrid graphics and HT3.0. For connectivity the board has 6 USB

ports, a VGA port, an HDMI port, 5 SATA connectors, one eSATA port, one PCI

express x16 slot and two PCI express x1 slot.

The A780GM-A, part of the Black series of ECS boards, when coupled with

Sapphire Radeon HD 3650 during our tests gave good results. We ran it through a

series of rigorous benchmarks like PCMark '05, 3DMark '06, CineBench and a

couple of gaming benchmarks to assess its performance. In PCMark it scored 5213

while on 3DMark it registered 4010, which is comparatively a good score. On

CineBench it scored 6762 CB-CPUs with an Open GL score of 3562 CB-GFX. The two

gaming benchmarks we took were Unreal Tournament 3 and Crysis to assess the FPS

rate and it stood at 26 FPS and 35.24 FPS respectively. However, the latter

score was obtained under medium default configuration.

Bottomline: A good buy for gamers looking for

optimum performance for a budget-range motherboard.