ECS A770M-A

For all this board has going for it, there were a few problems. Claiming to be an AM2+ board but not supporting two of the latest processors is a disappointment. Granted, those chips may be a mismatch for this board but that option should be made available to the consumer. Also, the SATA port design needs to be corrected to account for the length of today's videocards. And I would love to see more overclocking options available within the BIOS. System builders will always provide a demand for affordable motherboards and ECS supplies them with what they need. Elitegroup Computer Systems also maintains a level of quality and performance that keeps customers happy. If you are in the market for an AMD board with some nice features and a great price, you should definitely check out the ECS A770M-A.

The ECS A770M-A motherboard is a great value board that provides you with new chipset features at a very low price point.

The ECS A770M-A is squarely targeted for the entry level, as indicated in the opening page. With first revision boards there are always some bugs to work out and the A770M-A is no different. The BIOS is void of any useful tweaking options, so overclocking was frustrating, to say the least. Hopefully, later revisions will include CPU multiplier settings, better voltage control and the ability to tweak the memory settings. ECS also needs to revisit the cooling solution on the chipset, either via heatpipes, or active cooling to achieve better stability. On the plus side, the AMD 770 does have some potential as the benchmarks have shown with the refinements to the chipset over the 6 series. When the board was running, it was a dream, save for the occasional shutdowns due to what seemed to be an overheating chipset.

Will the ECS A770M-A win any overclocking benchmarking contest? No. Will it save you some major bucks and provide you will some stability and reliable? Yes. Like we stated before this motherboard isn?t going to set any overclocking records but if you are looking at a decent office or small workstation build maybe you should take a look at this board.

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.