ECS A785GM-AD3 AM3 Black Series motherboard review

Unboxing and Board Layout

For your viewing pleasure I have produced an unboxing video with initial impressions which can be viewed below.

ECS A785GM-AD3 comes in a standard size box for ATX sized motherboards with a nice dragon design featured on the cover. The board is adorned with AMD logos showing support for all brands of current AMD CPUs. The box does a good job of explaining the unique features to this board which include eJIFFY quick boot operating system and 15u gold contacts in RAM and CPU slots.

The board uses a full sized ATX layout with a black PCB. Enthusiasts should love the color of the PCB including me. The back of the board uses a plastic back plate like many other boards on the market.

The I/O panel provides two PS/2 ports, six USB ports, one eSATA port, one 1 GBps LAN port, VGA and DVI outputs, 5 channel analog audio and an optical audio output. The VGA and DVI outputs are provided by the integrated HD 4200 chipset. Firewire port is missing from action here, which is a shame because there are still a few camcorders out there that use firewire port to transfer video to PC.

On the right is the AM3 CPU socket. This socket is not compatible with the old AM2+ CPUs.

The board comes with one PCI-E 2.0 x16 slot, so multi-GPU configurations are out of the question. The board also offers 2 PCI-E x1 and 3 PCI slots.

The SB710 southbridge offers 5 SATA-II 3GBps ports but two of them will be blocked by a long double slot video card like the HD 5850.

The northbridge heatsink with “Black Series” logo on top looks just beautiful. The heatsink gets hot to touch while running 3D graphics. I was able to overclock the integrated graphics chipset from 500 MHz to 800 MHz.

In the right image, are the memory slots color coded for convenience to run the memory in dual-channel mode. 1600 MHz memory is supported in overclocked mode with a maximum capacity of 16GB. Next to them are the 24-pin power and the IDE connector.

The board includes a Clear CMOS button in case an overclock goes wrong and the board does not boot. This button really helped me while I overclocked this board, so I’ll have to give ECS high marks here. Also included are the Reset and Power buttons, another wonderful addition.