ECS A780GM-A v1.0

BIOS:

The ECS A780GM-A v1.0 BLACK motherboard uses an American Megatrends BIOS. Found inside this BIOS are the standard features one would expect but not the advanced tweaking capabilities found on other enthusiast-oriented motherboards. The DRAM timings and frequencies can be manually adjusted as well as adjusting the CPU and DRAM voltages. Adjusting these voltages are a bit awkward with having to input a number from 1 to 63 with each number representing a +4mV step (or +10mV for the DDR2) beyond its default voltage. The maximum voltage increase that the CPU can be supplied is +252mV while the DDR2 memory is +630mV.

System Setup:

As we have already delivered our 780G graphics results under Linux, it should be to no surprise that this motherboard is compatible with Linux. Permitting you are running a recent Linux 2.6 kernel with your distribution, you should experience no major compatibility issues. With the ECS A780GM-A we hadn't experienced any Linux issues but it had worked out of the box with Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Beta.

For benchmarking the other aspects of this motherboard we had used an AMD Phenom 9500 processor, 2GB of OCZ DDR2-800 Reaper HPC memory, Western Digital 160GB SATA 2.0 hard drive, and a SilverStone Zeus ST75ZF 750W power supply. Running on the software side was the Ubuntu 8.04 LTS "Hardy Heron" Beta with the Linux 2.6.25 x86_64 kernel. As we have already delivered our Radeon HD 3200 benchmarks from this motherboard, we won't repeat them again in this article but we will be sharing our performance results from other areas of the system. The Linux benchmarks we had used were LAME encoding, timed disk reads (hdparm), Gzip compression, and RAMspeed. We had compared this motherboard to the 790FX-based Gigabyte MA790FX-DS5 using the same system hardware and software configuration. Shortly we'll also be comparing this motherboard to an ASRock 780G DisplayPort motherboard (also under Linux, of course).