ECS A890GXM-A AM3 Black Series motherboard review

Packing and Contents

The ECS A890GXM-A AM3 Black Series motherboard comes in a standard-sized ATM motherboard box with all the usual protective packing including the non-static bag. Since it is for an AMD CrossFire platform, we see a dragon displayed on the box along with all of the information showing what it is for; that it supports Phenom II X-4 AM3, that it is “green”, that it has the 890GX chipset that includes integrated HD 4290 and CrossFire-X and CrossFire technology.

You can also see AMD’s Vision logo on the box and we read that the ECS A890GXM-A motherboard features special 15 micron gold contacts. We also note that it will boot almost instantly with a custom Linux-based operating system called eJiffy so that you can immediately begin using your PC to connect to the Internet with its superfast Dual-Giga LAN. This dual LAN allows two single connections to act as one for double the bandwidth. In this way you can immediately begin some tasks with your PC far quicker with eJiffy than by booting into Windows 7 which it also fully supports.Here is the box from another angle:

On the back we see many more details and the features of this motherboard. We see the Qooltech III is a passive cooler with dual copper pipes to help keep the motherboard cool for testing and running your CPU overclocks. Also, note the featured 4most Display which includes onboard HDMI, DVI, D-Sub and Displayport for excellent multi-media support and visual performance. ECS’ 15 micron Gold Contact consists of relatively thick gold plating on CPU pins, memory sockets and PCI-E x16 slots that allow for superb contact and long-lasting durability.

Opening the box, we see the Manual, the CD and the Quick Installation guide. Using the automatic installation for the drivers is really easy and it will do most of the work for you. After you reboot, you can install the included utilities including eJiffy which can get you online in as quickly as ten seconds.

Now on to the goodies. This is what you are greeted with upon removal of the cardboard separator. We see the SATA connectors and the I/O panel cover atop the static bag that covers the motherboard.

Let’s take everything out of the box except for the motherboard.

Take a look at the I/O shield and a SATA connector.

The instructions are very clear and the manual is well written.

Finally here is the motherbard. It is beautiful, well arranged and offers good features. As you can see it is well-marked and everything is clearly identified:

It is a very good-looking Black PCB as befits ECS’ Black Series; check out the reverse and note the plastic backplate for the AMD CPU.

Let’s look from another angle and check out the I/O connections. Everything you could want is here including VGA, HDMI, DVI, D-Sub, DisplayPort and even a Dual-Giga LAN that allows for two connections to act as one for high bandwidth and faster transfers. Look very carefully at the little red button. It is clear CMOS and it is a great feature that keeps you from having to open your case if you mess up your overclock. It is also small enough so that you will not reset it accidentally. However, you will find no legacy of any kind including no PS2 mouse, no firewire, and no IDE.

Now from another angle you can see the QoolTech III with its dual copper heatpipes passively cooling the MOS, NB and SB to focus on silent cooling. In addition the SB850 features 5x SATA 6G ports and 1x eSATA, with RAID 0,1, 5&10 configurations, and proprietary ECS BIOS tweaking through the M.I.B III Overclocking utility.

Sharp-eyed readers might notice that ABT has an early revision of this MB; the caps for the reset buttons are missing on ours (above and below left) but will be on your retail MB (below right).

Everything we see looks really good so far. Let’s head for our testing setup and the specifications.