Testing:

For testing purposes, the ECS A770M-A (V1.0) AMD 770 motherboard was installed in a system with the following additional components:

» AMD X2 6000+ processor
» Asus Arctic Square CPU cooler
» 4GB (4x1024) Patriot PC2-6400 Low Latency DDR2 RAM
» eVGA 8800GTS 640MB PCI Express graphics card
» Tagan ITZ 1000W power supply
» 80GB Seagate SATA 3Gbps hard drive
» 500GB Seagate SATA 3Gbps hard drive
» SATA DVD/CDRW
» 6-in-1 Media Card reader
» Fans: 2x120mm; 2x80mm


Testing consisted of running through a handful of benchmarks (with a reboot between each benchmark), plus a bit of real world testing for good measure. The system as described above was run through the tests listed below:

Tests Executed:
» Lavalys Everest Ultimate Edition Version 4.2
» Simpli Software HD Tach RW 3.0.4.0
» Sisoft Sandra Xii SP1
» Futuremark PCMark Vantage
» Futuremark 3DMark06
» Real World:
» Crysis Medium Settings
» Crysis High Settings

Motherboard Compared:

» ECS A770M-A
» Asus M3A
» Asus M2N32-SLI

The Asus M3A and ECS A770M-A are based on the AMD 770 northbridge chipset, with the AMD SB600 southbridge. The northbridge and southbridge chipset comparison makes these boards nearly identical. While the older Asus M2N32-SLI Deluxe motherboard is based on the older nVidia 590 SLI MCP chipset.

Everest 4.2 Ultimate Edition:

First up we will cover the results of the Lavalys Everest Ultimate Edition Version 4.2 Memory Benchmark. Higher values are better for read and write speeds (in MB/s), while lower values are better for the latency (in ns).


I was not surprised by the difference in scores between the ECS A770M-A and the Asus M2N32-SLI. The newer chipset has better memory handling. What did surprise me is the difference between the ECS A770M-A and the Asus M3A motherboard. I was expecting the scores to be similar, but the Asus M3A scores are closer to the Asus M2N32-SLI motherboard, and the ECS A770M-A is the clear winner!