ECS A790GXM-A Black Series

System Setup:

Our hardware used for testing this motherboard consisted of an AMD Phenom 9500 quad-core processor, 2GB of OCZ Reaper HPC DDR2-800 memory, Western Digital 160GB SATA 2.0 hard drive, and the motherboard's integrated graphics. On the software side was Ubuntu 8.04 with the Linux 2.6.24 kernel and X Server 1.4.0.90 and GCC 4.2.3. The ATI Catalyst driver in use was Catalyst 8.9.

As we have already published detailed Radeon HD 3300 / 790GX benchmarks earlier in the week, we are not repeating them again today. In that article we found the integrated graphics on the 790GX had a slight to moderate advantage over the 780G in all of the tests except for the 2D GTK testing. The 790GX is also slightly ahead of the Radeon HD 2400PRO PCI Express graphics card.

We had compared the performance of the ECS A790GXM-A Black to the earlier reviewed ECS A780GM-A Black. To facilitate the benchmarking we had used Phoronix Test Suite 1.4.0 Alpha 2 with the timed PHP compilation, timed Apache compilation, timed Gzip compression, LAME MP3 encoding, GnuPG file encryption, OpenSSL RSA 4096-bit performance, RAMspeed, and Sunflow Rendering System tests.

Aside from the quantitative performance, the ECS A790GXM-A Black had possessed no problems working "out of the box" with Ubuntu 8.04 LTS.