ECS A785GM-M Black

The memory performance was elevated on the 785G compared to the 780G setup.

The A785GM-M from ECS also exhibited better memory performance than the 780G system with Stream's memory addition test, even though the timings and frequencies were maintained for the RAM/CPU between the two setups.

The AMD 785G is only a marginal upgrade over the AMD 780G with the key difference just being the upgraded graphics engine. The AMD 785G is derived from the RV620 core compared to the RV610 with the 780G, which offers UVD2 and other video detail enhancements, HDMI 1.3 support, DisplayPort capabilities, and accelerated video transcode capabilities. UVD2 on Linux may not mean much right now since XvBA (the X-Video Bitstream Acceleration API that will take advantage of the Unified Video Decoder 2), but it will soon enough. Oddly, however, the graphics performance with the Radeon HD 4200 graphics were actually slower than that of the Radeon HD 3200 as shown by the vDrift and World of Padman tests. We are currently running more ATI Radeon HD 4200 tests on this motherboard and will report upon any findings.

The ECS A785GM-M motherboard is priced at about $90 USD, which is fair compared to other AMD 785G motherboards. What we like about this motherboard are the VGA/DVI/HDMI connections, eSATA, Firewire, an easy overclocking process, and just the overall package. When using Ubuntu 9.10, the only real issue we have been challenged by during our tenure with this motherboard has been the Radeon HD 4200 graphics is actually lower performance compared to the Radeon HD 3200, but again, we are continuing this investigation.

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