ECS A890GXM-A Motherboard

On-Board Peripherals

AMD 890GX chipset is a dual-chip solution and we’ve already published all the main specs from this chipset on the first page of this review.

As we mentioned earlier, AMD 890GX is the first chipset to natively support SATA-600 ports and ECS A890GXM-A provides five SATA-600 ports. The sixth port was converted into an eSATA-600 port on the rear panel of the product. These ports support RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10.

The four of the five SATA-600 ports are placed on the motherboard edge rotated 90°, so video cards won’t block them. The fifth SATA port is placed in a position that expansion cards won’t block it as well.

Figure 6: SATA-600 and ATA-133 ports.

Even though the chipset supports one parallel ATA (PATA, a.k.a. IDE) port, no port of this kind is provided. Also no floppy disk drive controller is present.

A890GXM-A features on-board power and reset buttons, but the sample we got was a pre-production sample and these buttons came without their caps (see Figure 6). Of course on the final product these buttons have their caps on.

This motherboard carries all 14 USB 2.0 ports supported by the chipset, six soldered on the rear panel and eight through four headers located on the motherboard.

This product doesn’t have USB 3.0 ports and also doesn’t come with FireWire (IEEE1394) ports.

Audio is generated by the chipset using a Realtek ALC892 codec. Unfortunately this component isn’t listed on Realtek’s website and the motherboard manual doesn’t talk about the technical features of this chip, so we can’t comment on the quality of the on-board audio from this motherboard. The board has an SPDIF optical connector soldered on the rear panel. A coaxial SPDIF output can be added by installing the appropriate adapter on the motherboard “SPDIFO” header (this adapter doesn’t come with the product).

The analog audio connectors are independent if you have a 5.1 analog speaker system, but if you have a 7.1 analog speaker system you will have to “kill” either the “mic in” or the “line in” jack to install it. This may not be a problem for most users, since if you want a 7.1 audio system you will probably connect the motherboard to a home theater receiver or a digital speaker set using either the SPDIF or the HDMI connector.

ECS A890GXM-A has two Gigabit Ethernet ports, each one controlled by a Realtek RTL8111DL chip, which is connected to the system using a PCI Express x1 lane and thus not presenting any potential performance issues. These ports support “teaming,” i.e., being used in parallel to double bandwidth to 2 Gbps – if you have networking equipment that also supports this feature, of course.

In Figure 7, you can see the motherboard rear panel with VGA output, DVI-D output, DisplayPort output, HDMI output, clear CMOS button, six USB 2.0 ports, one eSATA-600 port, two Gigabit Ethernet ports and shared analog 7.1 audio outputs.

Figure 7: Motherboard rear panel.

As you can see, this motherboard comes with four different kinds of video connectors, but only two of them can be used at the same time.

No keyboard or mouse PS/2 connector is available, thus you have to use a USB keyboard and a USB mouse with this motherboard.