Shootouts

A Trio of AMD 890GX Boards - More Mainstream AMD Madness

By Vincent Chang - 16 Apr 2010

ECS A890GXM-A

ECS A890GXM-A

ECS may not have the market brand recognition as ASUS but the company offers decent boards at reasonable prices and while it may lack some of the perks of the bigger brands, there's nothing wrong with being simply functional. The A890GXM-A, part of ECS' Black Series, shows a definite hint of polish. Touches that we often associate with the more popular brands, like onboard power/reset buttons, solid capacitors, Clear CMOS button, etc. are on this board. Yes, it would appear that the A890GXM-A is a board that would fare competitively against the bigger manufacturers. 

This ECS design looks quite familiar, from the colors used to the heatsink design, which seems to have been used in other Black series boards.

ECS has chosen to have an extra DisplayPort. This DisplayPort can work together with HDMI, DVI or analog ports at the same time but you can't use HDMI and DVI both together (the latter two share the same DVO port and there's only one supported on the chipset). The DisplayPort also shares the same signal as the first PCIe x16 slot so they cannot be used in conjunction. It also means there's no space for PS/2 ports on the rear I/O.

So what does ECS bring to the table? In terms of features, the A890GXM-A is rather standard, with five SATA 6Gbps ports and an eSATA at the rear. Legacy interfaces like floppy and PATA are not present, which leaves ECS with more than adequate PCB space to hone its board layout. There's no USB 3.0 functionality like the ASUS, but they both use identical Realtek HD audio CODEC, the ALC892.

ECS has chosen to go with dual Gigabit Ethernet controllers, a surprising move just like its addition of a DisplayPort. It certainly breaks up the monotony for us but we aren't too sold on the dual Gigabit part personally. DisplayPort however is much welcomed, though the choice of screens/displays that support it is still criminally limited. Just like the ASUS, the integrated graphics engiine come with 128MB of SidePort memory, but unlike it, there are no options in the BIOS to adjust the integrated graphics settings, which is a shame. 

An almost perfect arrangement of the five SATA 6Gbps ports here means that there won't be any layout issues.

A typical four-DIMM setup with the 24-pin ATX power connector nearby. Color-coded for easy and idiot-proof installation.

Power and reset buttons for those who run their boards out of the casing. They are not the pretty, glowing kinds we have seen before but they get the job done.

The two red PCIe 2.0 x16 slots are reserved for your CrossFireX setup (deferring to x8/x8 bandwidth allocation) with two graphics cards installed. The blue slot meanwhile has an electrical interface of only x4 despite its length.

The usual heatpipe bolstered passive heatsink to make sure that this board runs cool. We saw no possible obstruction for those intending to install huge, complex CPU heatsinks.

With a solid, chunky looking heatsink, solid capacitors all round and a layout that we just couldn't find any flaw with, it seems that ECS has produced a very competent looking AMD 890GX board. We'll know better later after the benchmarks if it performs up to its specs, but from a usability point of view, there appears to be no major issues here. It may lack some features like IDE but it's balanced by some perks found on more expensive boards. While the hardware looks very decent indeed, the BIOS still lacks the polish and options we have come to expect from brands like ASUS, Gigabyte and MSI.

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