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
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.
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Bottomline: A good buy for gamers looking for
optimum performance for a budget-range motherboard.