We've looken at a fair share of motherboards based off AMD's 700 series chipset. Probably one of the names most hardware enthusiasts don't think of immediately is ECS but they've been trying to put out some more enthusiast geared motherboards. Today we'll be looking at one of these the 790GX based A790GXM-A motherboard.

As with all 790GX motherboards currently there are no micro-ATX versions and this board is full ATX. Two 16x PCI-Express slots are there for Crossfire support, two PCI-Express slots, and two PCI slots onboard. In addition to that you have six SATA adapters, an IDE slot, 4 DDR2 1066 slots for memory expansion. The cooling should be adequate for the Northbridge and Southbridge of the ECS motherboard. You can see one unusual thing is the location of the 8-pin for CPU power. On the board you can also see USB headers in addition to a power on and reset switch onboard the motherboard next to the SATA ports.

External connectors include a PS2 mouse and keyboard port, VGA cable, HDMI output, six USB 2.0 ports, dual Gigabit Ethernet, onboard HD song with digital out and a com port. We'd prefer personally to lose the com port in favor of E-SATA, Firewire, or a DVI output.

A closer look at the black PCB and the coloring on the PCI slots.

And here's the SB750 Southbridge on the board.
 

The hardware bundle is the basics with four SATA cables, IDE cable, floppy cable, and I/O shield.