As you could see on the first page, the chipset supports six SATA-300 ports and all are present on the reviewed board, supporting RAID levels 0, 1 and 10. These ports are placed facing the motherboard edge, as you can see in Figure 4. This is a terrific solution, because on motherboards where the ports are facing up the video cards usually block the access to them of even completely prevent you from installing SATA cables on them.

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Figure 4: SATA ports.

ECS A785HM-M also has two eSATA-300 ports, controlled by a JMicron JMB362 chip, but they don’t support RAID. SB710 south bridge supports one ATA-133 port, which is present on the motherboard.

The chipset supports 12 USB 2.0 ports and the motherboard provides all of them, six soldered on the rear panel and six through headers. Unfortunately this motherboard doesn’t come with any I/O bracket for you to use these extra USB ports. ECS A785GM-M also features two FireWire ports, one soldered on the real panel and one available through a header and the product doesn’t come with a bracket for you to use it, so you probably better get a case with a FireWire port to use this second port.

Audio is generated by the chipset using a Realtek ALC888S codec, which is a good component for a mainstream motherboard, providing 7.1 audio with 24-bit resolution, 97 dB signal-to-noise ratio for the outputs, 90 dB signal-to-noise ratio for the analog inputs, 192 kHz sampling rate for the outputs and 96 kHz sampling rate for the inputs. This motherboard comes with an on-board optical SPDIF output, which is great. As you can see in Figure 5, this motherboard has analog outputs only for 5.1 audio, so 7.1 audio is only supported through the optical SPDIF output.

This motherboard also features one Gigabit Ethernet port, controlled by a Realtek RTL8111DL chip. This controller is connected to the south bridge chip through individual PCI Express x1 lanes, which is perfect, as this configuration won’t limit the performance of your Gigabit Ethernet ports (controllers connected to the system using the regular PCI bus can face a bottleneck – i.e., may not be able to achieve the maximum Gigabit Ethernet performance).

In Figure 5, you can see the rear panel of the motherboard. There you will find VGA output, DVI output, HDMI output, FireWire port, six USB 2.0 ports, two eSATA-300 ports, Gigabit Ethernet port, 5.1 channel independent analog audio outputs and optical SPDIF output.

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Figure 5: Rear connectors.

As you can see this motherboard doesn’t have mouse or keyboard connectors, so you are required to use USB mouse and keyboard with this motherboard.

On the other hand it features HDMI and optical SPDIF output, making this motherboard a great option to build a home theater PC (HTPC).

ECS A785GM-M offers some additional features, like a POST diagnostics display, which helps you to diagnose why the computer isn’t turning on through a two-digit number, reset and power buttons soldered on the motherboard, which helps a lot when you are building a PC outside a case or are debugging your PC, and also a clear CMOS button, which is certainly more convenient than using a jumper.

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Figure 6: POST display and clear CMOS, reset and power buttons.

Like other new motherboard from ECS, A785GM-M features a function called eJiffy, which is basically a Linux-based operating system with Internet browser, instant messaging and other features stored inside the motherboard ROM chip, so you don’t need to load the operating system or even have a hard drive installed to enter the Internet and do basic stuff like browsing, e-mail, instant messaging, etc. ASUS has a similar feature on their motherboards, called Express Gate.

In Figure 7, you can see all accessories that come with this motherboard.

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Figure 7: Accessories.

Before going to our benchmarking, let’s recap the main features from this motherboard.