ASRock A780FullDisplayPort

BIOS:

For the BIOS on this motherboard, ASRock continues to depend upon American Megatrends Inc. While ASRock continues to improve, their BIOSes aren't regarded as being very friendly to those interested in overclocking or tweaking their motherboards. With the A780FullDisplayPort there are the basic CPU frequency, PCI-E frequency, CPU multiplier, voltage, and memory clock settings.

System Setup:

The ECS A780GM-A v1.0 is the first AMD 780G motherboard we had reviewed and when looking at that motherboard we were pleased that the 780G and SB700 Southbridge had worked with Linux "out of the box". Specifically, most of our testing was done with Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, which uses the Linux 2.6.24 kernel and an X Server 1.4.1 pre-release. Like the A780GM-A, the ASRock A780FullDisplayPort had also worked well with Ubuntu 8.04. All of the onboard features were working and LM_Sensors was successful in detecting the onboard sensors. The only caveat with this motherboard is that if you are interested in using the DisplayPort connection, you must be using the proprietary fglrx driver as neither the open-source xf86-video-ati or xf86-video-radeonhd drivers support this latest VESA standard, yet.

With the ASRock A780FullDisplayPort we had used an AMD Phenom 9500 quad-core processor, 2GB of OCZ DDR2-800 Reaper HPC memory, Western Digital 160GB SATA 2.0 hard drive, and a SilverStone Zeus ST75ZF power supply. The display driver in use was AMD's Catalyst 8.5 Suite. For comparing the performance of the ASRock A780FullDisplayPort and ECS A780GM-A v1.0 motherboards we had used Phoronix Test Suite 0.9.0. The test suite ran was pcqs-motherboard, which consists of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, Nexuiz, OpenArena, X-Plane 9, PHP compilation, Apache compilation, Gzip compression, MP3 encoding, GnuPG encryption, IOZone, OpenSSL, RAMspeed, and Sunflow. On the following pages are the results.