It has been a while since the launch of the 780G chipset by AMD. Yet manufactures continue to build motherboards based on this dying yet rock-solid chipset. Since the 780G is built around the HD3200 class GPU, it does have the muscle to playback high definition content at HD 1080p.

The ECS A780GM-A Ultra is a part of the 'Black Series' edition boards from ECS. Since it's a socket AM2+ motherboard, it supports socket AM2, AM2+ and AM3 processors. These include AMD Sempron, Athlon 64, Phenom and Phenom II CPUs.

Features
The 780G is certainly not the fastest but is no slowpoke either. With the core operating at a decent speed of 500 MHz the ECS A780GM-A Ultra can handle games that are not too demanding at low settings. Now, if that's not enough, the board has support for hybrid Crossfire that allows you to club the performance of both the IGP as well as the standalone graphics card.

Like most motherboard manufacturers, ECS have also chosen to cool both the northbridge and southbridge chips, passively.

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The A780GM-A is well laid out and surprisingly for an entry level board, it sports all-solid capacitors that won't heat up your cabinet as fast as regular capacitors and they last longer too. The board is really well designed and the layout is labelled clearly. One drawback is the PCle lock which is too small and this makes ejecting the graphics card difficult. A point worth noting would be the exclusion of a DVI port. The board doesn't even come bundled with an HDMI to DVI converter. Based on the SB750 Southbridge, the board supports a total of six SATA ports, one eSATA port, Gigabit LAN, 7.1 channel audio, 12 USB ports (six rear, six via-headers), one VGA and HDMI port. In addition, two PCle xl and one PCle x16 slots are supported, fully compliant to the PCI Express Generation 2.0. The board supports a whopping 32 GB of DDR2 memory, though it hasn't been tested but will work fine with 8 GB installed. The board has a 5-phase power design that provides steady power to the CPU for more efficiency and stability.

Performance
Based on a slower chipset when compared to the mighty 790GX, the board isn't competent enough to handle a game like Crysis. So to be able to test the board against Crysis we topped it with the best. Benchmarks were run using AMD's Phenom II X4 810, 500 GB WD Caviar, 4 GB of Kingston KHX 8500 and the GeForce GTX 280 AMP. Crysis benchmark returned a frame rate of 38 fps in gamer mode at 1680x1050 with AA enabled. Left4Dead on the other hand, gave a very playable 52 fps at the same resolution with all settings maxed out.