Introduction

With stocks of AMD's latest CPUs starting to fill store shelves in greater numbers recently, we've begun our look into supporting board products, each containing AMD's 9-series chipsets. Today our sample comes from none other than ECS and their high-end "Black Extreme" series of products, which in their latest incarnation boast quite a few unique features. The "Black Extreme" story centers around a tale of two defeated dragons who turned themselves into black holes in order to torment humanity, and have now returned looking to meet the heroes destined to slay them. An epic tale for what may very well prove to be a legendary board. Let's take a look to see what it brings to the table.

Specifications

AMD 990FX Chipset

Launched during Computex 2011, the AMD 990FX chipset is the top option of the three new northbridge solutions from AMD. All three feature several new features specific to the 9-Series chipsets, but the majority of technology is carried over from AMD's previous 8-Series products. Featuring Hypertransport 3.0, and native SATA 6 Gb/s connectivity via the SB950, the 9-Series from AMD is an incremental upgrade. The big marquee difference, of course, is the new AM3+ CPU support, CPUs which have yet to arrive fully within the retail space, and are expected to be widely available later this year. All 9-series chipsets provide DDR3-1866 memory support natively, if a supporting CPU is installed. Also available is an IOMMU connection, allowing virtual machines to directly access hardware capabilities, rather than offering a software interface using hardware emulation. Although not natively supported in the Windows environment at this time, this feature is more intended for Linux users.

The AMD 970 chipset offers a single PCIe 2.0 x16 connection for a single graphics card, while the 990X allows that link to be split into two separate PCIe 2.0 x8 connections, for multi card configurations. The 990FX chipset found on this board features two full PCIe 2.0 x16 connections for graphics, with the option available to split each PCIe 2.0 x16 link into two separate PCIe 2.0 x8 links, as decided by OEM board design and layout. An extra x4 link is also available via the AMD SB950, and the AMD SB950 Southbridge chipset also houses all of the I/O functionality, such as the six native SATA 6 Gb/s ports.

Of course, that leads to today's product, the ECS A990FXM-A.Will the Dragons overcome humanity, or will humanity, and the ECS A990FXM-A, prevail?

Packaging

The ECS A990FXM-A comes in a very large, very metallic green box. The highly reflective surface of the packaging makes it hard to photograph, unfortunately, but it sure does stand out. The front of the box has what appears to be a case badge, with the board's name boldly printed in white. Hiding behind the name is a silver metallic dragon, harkening to ECS's "Black Extreme" thematic styling and accompanying legend. The case badge itself pulls away from the box to reveal a window to the board contained inside, as well as revealing a few product features in detail on its reverse side. The rear of the box has a small picture of the board itself, while the rest of the rear is populated by 30 different product highlights listing the features the board offers.


Upon opening the box, we find another white cardboard box inside, with a large window showing the board inside. Lifting the lid reveals that the "window" is actually a plastic clamshell, wrapped in protective layers of foam.


Under the board we find another box, which contains the included accessories. Under that, the box is empty, but it did provide us a moment to recognize the well crafted and high-quality packing material used throughout. Opening the box containing the goodies reveals yet another engineered container with partitions separating some of the accessories from the others, to ensure the entire package arrives on your doorstep securely. When we removed the top of the board's clamshell, we found that there was still another layer of foam that slipped underneath the plastic itself. The huge engineering effort that went into this packaging really helped give the board itself a high-quality feel that is only made possible by such high-quality materials as has gone into the ECS A990FXM-A's box.