[W1zzard]

Introduction

I would like to thank ECS for supplying the tested motherboard.

The ECS A770M-A is one of the first ECS motherboards that supports the new AM2+ Socket. This means that it is an optimum habitat for the new Phenom processors. However, you can also use all previous generation Athlon64 models with this motherboard. The board also uses AMD's new RX780 chipset which uses HyperTransport 3 and includes support for PCI-Express Generation 2. This motherboard has been designed for the value segment but still tries to give you all the features of more expensive motherboards like Gigabit Ethernet and high quality 8 channel audio.

Features

ECS A770M-A
Processor	All AMD AM2 and AM2+ compatible processors, including Phenom and Athlon64/FX
HT	5200/2000/1600/1200 MT/s
Chipset	AMD 770 (RX780) & AMD SB 600
Graphics	No integrated VGA
Memory	4x 240 Pin DDR2, Dual Channel DDR400/533/667/800, up to 32 GB
BIOS	AMI Bios
Slots	1x PCI-E x16 2x PCI-E x1 3x PCI
HDD Connectivity	1x ATA-133 (AMD SB600) 4xSATA-II (AMD SB600) 1xExternal SATA (JMicron JMB361)
Networking	1x 10/100/1000 Mbps - Realtek RTL811B via PCI-Express
Ports	10x USB 2.0 (6 on Back Panel)
Audio	8 Channel Realtek ALC883 HD Audio
Form Factor	ATX 305 x 210 mm

Specifications

CPU

• AMD Phenom™ processor (Socket AM2+)
• AMD Athlon™ 64 X2 Dual Core/ Athlon™ 64 / Sempron processor
• High-performance HyperTransport 3.0 CPU Interface
• Support transfer rate of 5200/2000/1600/1200 mega-transfers per second

CHIPSET

• AMD® 770 & AMD® SB600
• North Bridge: AMD® 770
• South Bridge: AMD® SB600

MEMORY

• Dual-channel DDR2 800 memory architecture
• 4 x 240-pin DDR2 DIMM socket support up to 32GB*
• Support DDR2 800/667/533/400 DDR2 SDRAM
• * (Due to the DRAM maximum size is 2GB at present, the memory maximum size we have tested is 8GB)

EXPANSION SLOT

• 1 x PCI Express x16 slot
• 2 x PCI Express x1 slots
• 3 x PCI slots

STORAGE

• Support by AMD SB600
• 2 x Ultra DMA133/100/66 devices
• 4 x Serial ATAII 3.0Gb/s devices
• RAID0, RAID1, RAID10 configuration
• Supported by JMicron® JMB361
• 1 x External SATA 3.0 Gb/s port

AUDIO

• Realtek ALC883 8-channel audio CODEC
• Compliant with HD audio specification

LAN

• Realtek RTL8101E/8111B Gigabit Fast Ethernet NIC

REAR PANEL I/O

• 1 x PS/2 keyboard & PS/2 mouse connectors
• 6 x USB ports
• 1 x Ethernet Port
• 1 x External SATA port
• 1 x Serial port (COM1)
• 1 x Audio port (Line-in, Line-out, Mic-in)

INTERNAL I/O CONNECTORS & HEADERS

• 1 x 24-pin ATX Power Supply connector
• 1 x 4-pin ATX 12V connector
• CPUFAN/PWRFAN/SYSFAN connectors
• 1 x IDE connector
• 4 x Serial ATA connectors
• 1 x Speaker header
• 1 x Front panel switch/LED header
• 1 x Front panel audio header
• 1 x SPDIF out header
• 1 x CD in header
• 2 x USB headers

SYSTEM BIOS

• AMI BIOS with 8Mb SPI ROM
• Supports Plug and Play, STR/STD, Hardware monitor, Multi Boot, DMI
• Supports ACPI revision

FORM FACTOR

• ATX Size, 305mm*210mm

Packaging

I prefer the new color theme of ECS' packaging. The white together with the smooth color gradients leaves a much more professional impression than the old design. On the back the motherboard's main features are highlighted. I also find it important that ECS mentions "Supports AMD Phenom, Athlon FX. Athlon, Sempron processors" right on the front of the package. Many users still haven't been properly educated that AM2 and AM2+ processors are socket-interchangeable.

Contents

We received:

• Motherboard
• Floppy Cable, 1x SATA cable
• Manual, IO Shield, Driver CD

Board Layout

Click here for a 3000x2500 high-res shot of the board (3 MB download), the back is here.


Given the form factor choice of this motherboard, you may run into clearance issues with tall memory or when using a heatsink that gets close to the two tall capacitors near the IO area.


The connectors from left to right are: PS/2 Mouse, PS/2 Keyboard, RS232 Serial Interface, E-SATA Port, 6x USB, 1x Ethernet and audio.


You can use up to four memory modules on this motherboard. If you install two memory modules in slots with the same color, they will run in dual-channel mode.

Connectors

The power connectors are around the standard spots. Unlike many other boards from ECS, the 12V power connector is NOT placed in the middle of the board, but near the edge which allows far easier cable routing.


Four SATA 3.0 Gb/s ports are provided by the AMD Chipset.


A single IDE port is good for CD/DVD-ROM use, if you still use PATA. Prices for SATA optical drives are dropping so fast, this port will soon be a thing of the past.


The headers are without any color distinction and unlabeled. This means that you have to consult the manual when installing this board.


Two fan headers are the absolute minimum for any motherboard, a third header near the Southbridge area would have been nice.

Slots

The slot configuration seems to favor PCI-E x1 cards, even with a two slot VGA card installed you still have access to 2 PCI and 2 PCI-E x1 slots.
It has also to be noted that the PCI-E x16 slot supports the new PCI-E 2.0 speeds. Although it took us a few BIOS revisions to get it working properly.

Cooling

Both Northbridge and Southbridge are passively cooled.

Chips

The monitoring chip is from ITE and carries the model number IT8726F-S.


The RTL8111B is a fairly common Ethernet chip from Realtek and connected via PCI-Express.


As clockgenerator an ICS9LPRS471 is used. It seems this is a new model specifically designed for the needs of Phenom processors.


The Realtek ALC883 offers high-quality HD audio output.

Capacitors

BIOS

ECS uses an Award BIOS.


The first page lets you change HDD settings and floppy disk drives - if you still have them. Also the setting IDE BusMaster can be found here. During normal use this should always be turned on since it enables your CPU to do other tasks while waiting for data from the HDD.


Advanced BIOS has a number of options to enable or disable certain CPU features and to set the order in which drives are tried at bootup. Please note that AMD Cool and Quiet is located here and not on the Power Page.


The Advanced Chipset page has two subpages which are related to the HyperTransport configuration and to the memory settings.


The HT configuration page lets you adjust the HyperTransport bus speed. This becomes important when overclocking, because the HT link will increase its frequency and could become unstable beyond certain frequencies.


You can select the memory clock mode between "Auto", "Limit" and "Manual". Limit means that you define a frequency maximum which should be used and the board picks a lower clock if the CPU clock speed or the memory timings require it. Manual lets you pick the memory frequency directly. However, be advised that the number given here is the clock speed at 200 MHz HT. If you overclock this increases proportionally.


To enable manual memory timing configuration you have to select "DCT 0" mode, whatever that is.


Once you have DCT 0 Mode enabled, you can change the CAS latency only! The other settings like tRAS, tRCD and tRP are still managed by the board.

BIOS Continued

On the Internal Peripherals page you find the usual options available in most BIOSes. The JMB361 SATA controller is responsible for connectivity of the single eSATA port. So if you don't plan to use eSATA, disable it and gain about one or two seconds of boot time.


No special items are listed on the power page.


Only two options are present in PCI PnP, both are usually fine at its default.


Several basic monitoring items can be found on the monitoring page, like CPU temperature, Fan speed, VCore and memory voltage.


A really nice feature is that you can exactly control how the CPU fan behaves based on CPU temperature. The options are very useful and let you tailor the settings exactly to your needs.


ECS has put only very few overclocking options in the BIOS. To enable overclocking you have to select CPU Overclocking Func = enabled. Once that is done, an additional option appears which lets you adjust the CPU frequency.


Two voltage adjustment options can be found on this board. One is to adjust VCore by up to +0.3V - reduced VCore would be nice here too. The memory voltage can be increased by up to 0.63V which a very nice range.

Unfortunately there is no multiplier change option present in the BIOS version we tested.

Test Systems

Test System "ECS A770M-A"
CPU:	AMD Athlon64 X2 5200+ 2.6 GHz (Socket AM2; Windsor)
Motherboard:	ECS A770M-A, BIOS 07/12/04 AMD RX780 + SB600
Memory:	2x 1024MB Mushkin 8000 5-5-5-15 2T
Video Card:	ATI X850 Pro PCI-E
Harddisk:	Maxtor DiamondMax 160GB
Power Supply:	OCZ GameXStream 700W
Software:	Windows XP SP2, Catalyst 7.11

Test System "Jetway M26GTM-3SP"
CPU:	AMD Athlon64 X2 5200+ 2.6 GHz (Socket AM2; Windsor)
Motherboard:	Jetway M26GTM-3SP, BIOS 4.2 NVIDIA NF6100-405 (MCP61S)
Memory:	2x 1024MB Mushkin 8000 5-5-5-15 2T
Video Card:	ATI X850 Pro PCI-E
Harddisk:	Maxtor DiamondMax 160GB
Power Supply:	OCZ GameXStream 700W
Software:	Windows XP SP2, Catalyst 7.11

Test System "Sapphire PI-AM2RS690MHD"
CPU:	AMD Athlon64 X2 5200+ 2.6 GHz (Socket AM2; Windsor)
Motherboard:	Sapphire PI-AM2RS690MHD, BIOS 2K070525 AMD 690G (RS690) + SB600
Memory:	2x 1024MB Mushkin 8000 5-5-5-15 2T
Video Card:	ATI X850 Pro PCI-E
Harddisk:	Maxtor DiamondMax 160GB
Power Supply:	OCZ GameXStream 700W
Software:	Windows XP SP2, Catalyst 7.11

Test System "Jetway M2A692-GDG"
CPU:	AMD Athlon64 X2 5200+ 2.6 GHz (Socket AM2; Windsor)
Motherboard:	Jetway M2A692-GDG , BIOS A09 AMD 690G (RS690) + SB600
Memory:	2x 1024MB Mushkin 8000 5-5-5-15 2T
Video Card:	ATI X850 Pro PCI-E
Harddisk:	Maxtor DiamondMax 160GB
Power Supply:	OCZ GameXStream 700W
Software:	Windows XP SP2, Catalyst 7.11

Aquamark

Aquamark was originally released as 3D benchmark, but with latest improvements in computer hardware the main bottleneck is now CPU and memory performance.

Lavalys Everest

Just like Sandra, Everest by our good friends at Lavalys is a sysinfo program. The integrated memory bandwidth testing suite is very well known and popular with enthusiasts from all over the world.

SuperPi

One of the classic benchmarks is SuperPi. This ancient program, which dates back to 1995, can calculate Pi to a certain number of digits. We used the 1M digits test of version 1.5.

RAR

RAR and the popular GUI version WinRAR are compression programs that offer several additional features over ZIP. We used version 3.61 on a 57 MB wave file digitally ripped from an audio CD. Uncompressed wave files are a good dataset to work on because they can be compressed a lot.

3DMark 2001

Even though 3DMark 2001 is quite old, it became a reliable system performance benchmark over time. Since current video card speeds are so high, the limiting factor is the CPU and memory performance. We tested at the default settings of 1024x768.

CineBench

MAXON is the creator of a popular 3D rendering software. Their benchmarking program CineBench is based on the same engine and renders a cinematic scene which would be a typical example of what professionals are using their software for. If available, a second test will be performance speedup from using multiple processors to render the scene. We used version CineBench v9.5.

Comanche 4

Comanche 4 is a helicopter simulation game that uses DirectX 8. Today's video cards have so much performance that the CPU and memory become the main bottleneck. We used the freely available Comanche 4 demo at 640x480.

Quake 3 Arena

ID Software's Quake 3 Arena is a fast-paced first person action shooter. The Quake 3 engine has been used in many other game titles like Return to Castle Wolfenstein. We used the included "four" demo with version 1.32 at 640x480 where the CPU and memory bandwidth are the performance limiting factor.

ffmpeg: H.264 to DVD

In this test we convert the 123 MB trailer of Pirates of the Caribbean - Dead Man's Chest from H.264 HDTV to DVD MPEG2 quality using ffmpeg SVN-r6218.

ffmpeg: DVD to XVid

Now we convert the resulting MPEG2 file from the previous test to XVid. This step is the typical DVD ripping encoding scenario.

LAME MP3 Encoding

LAME is a free MP3 encoding software. We encode a 57 MB wave file to MP3 using the "default" preset of version 3.96.1.

Windows Media Encoder

Our DVD version of the movie trailer is used here again. We convert it from MPEG2 DVD to Windows Media using the "DVD Profile" which performs two pass video encoding to the Windows Media Movie Format.

Blender 3D Rendering

The free 3D rendering software Blender is used to model and render three-dimensional graphics and animations. We used TPUBench's included demo scene which renders a ring. Blender 2.42a was used with SMP processing enabled.

Monkey's Audio Encoding

Monkeys Audio is a lossless audio encoding program. Encoders like MP3 or WMA introduce small losses that get bigger the lower the encoded bit rate is. The output files created by Monkey's Audio contain all the information from the original file, yet they are smaller than normally compressed files. Again we used our 57 MB audio CD track as input for Monkey's Audio version 4.01.

Prey

Prey is a 3D shooter based on a highly modified Doom 3 engine. In this benchmark we are trying to quantify differences in performance when an application is running limited by the video card. We tested at 1024x768 with maximum details. Clearly our X850 Pro is the bottleneck here, even though small performance differences are visible.

Rightmark Audio Analyzer

We used Rightmark Audio Analyzer together with a loop-back cable to analyze the quality of the on-board audio solution.

Summary

Frequency response (from 40 Hz to 15 kHz), dB:	+0.25, -0.31	Good
Noise level, dB (A):	-79.1	Average
Dynamic range, dB (A):	79.2	Average
THD, %:	0.010	Good
IMD, %:	0.036	Good
Stereo crosstalk, dB:	-77.2	Very good
IMD at 10 kHz, %:	0.108	Average

General performance: Good

Even though the Realtek ALC882 audio codec has support for 8 channels, which would let you think the audio quality is very high, the sound quality is only "good", which is actually slightly below average of the motherboards we tested so far.

Frequency Response

Frequency range	Response
From 20 Hz to 20 kHz, dB	-1.66, +0.25
From 40 Hz to 15 kHz, dB	-0.31, +0.25

Noise Level

Parameter	Left	Right
RMS power, dB:	-76.7	-76.3
RMS power (A-weighted), dB:	-79.1	-79.1
Peak level, dB FS:	-64.1	-63.6
DC offset, %:	-0.00	-0.00

Dynamic Range

Parameter	Left	Right
Dynamic range, dB:	+77.0	+77.3
Dynamic range (A-weighted), dB:	+79.2	+79.2
DC offset, %:	-0.00	-0.00

THD + Noise (at -3 dB FS)

Parameter	Left	Right
THD, %:	0.0101	0.0103
THD + Noise, %:	0.0319	0.0297
THD + Noise (A-weighted), %:	0.0268	0.0260

Intermodulation distortion

Parameter	Left	Right
IMD + Noise, %:	0.0364	0.0362
IMD + Noise (A-weighted), %:	0.0300	0.0298

Stereo crosstalk

Parameter	L <- R	L -> R
Crosstalk at 100 Hz, dB:	-72	-70
Crosstalk at 1 kHz, dB:	-76	-74
Crosstalk at 10 kHz, dB:	-77	-76

IMD (swept tones)

Parameter	Left	Right
IMD + Noise at 5 kHz, %:	0.0430	0.0428
IMD + Noise at 10 kHz, %:	0.1153	0.1166
IMD + Noise at 15 kHz, %:	0.1670	0.1664

Fan Noise

The ECS A770M-A is all passively cooled, so there is no fan noise. In the BIOS you will find a "SmartFan" option to control the CPU fan speed based on temperature.

Overclocking

Overclocking is quite limited on this board. The only memory timing that can be changed is CAS latency. You can adjust both CPU VCore and the memory voltage, unfortunately a CPU multiplier change option is not present.



We tried with both an X2 5200+ CPU and a 3000+ both could be overclocked to their respective maximum clocks. Testing beyond that to determine maximum HT speed was not possible because of the missing multiplier adjustment.

While overclocking is well possible with this board, do not expect any miracles from it. It is great for casual overclocking in the 0-25% range over stock, but not more I could say.

	The ECS A770M-A goes for less than $70 which makes it the cheapest AM2+ socket offering on the market.
	Great price AM2 and AM2+ support Gigabit Ethernet Quiet, only passive cooling Fan speed control in BIOS PCI-Express 2.0 support
	Limited overclocking options in BIOS Performance lower than higher-end motherboards Only two fan connectors Chipset tends to get quite hot during heavy use
8.0	The ECS A770M-A can excel mainly in one benchmark: price. The board is sold for less than $70 at many e-tailers which makes it the cheapest choice when you are looking for a motherboard that has AM2+ support for the new Phenoms. Even though the board is cheap ECS did not scrap Gigabit Ethernet which is becoming more and more handy nowadays. The eSATA port is a nice addition but not really needed. In most of our benchmarks we saw the ECS A770M-A lagging behind a bit the competition but you will probably not even notice the speed difference of a few percent during normal use. While the overclocking options in the BIOS are limited you can still reach some basic overclocks with it but there is not much fine tuning possible to get out the last MHz. Overall this is a fine motherboard for office PCs or systems that are not going to be overclocked. Even though you can (in theory) run Phenom CPUs in AM2 motherboards, this requires a BIOS update from the manufacturer which will not happen in many cases, especially in the budget segment. So to be safe and have an upgrade path a newly purchased motherboard should be AM2+ today, even if you will run it with a normal Athlon64 for a while.