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ECS A55F-A Review

Taimoor Hafeez — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 12:13:40 +0000

The recently released A55 chipsets from AMD are designed to bring their FM1 platform to the masses with budget motherboards. Now I’m not one to advocate for budget boards much, but it makes sense in the case of the new APUs because of AMD’s vision to bring graphical prowess with CPU performance on one small, cool, and very affordable chip.

So what the ECS A55F-A doesn’t feature is USB 3.0 and SATA III (6gbps) ports, but these cuts were designed to save on costs. You still get one PCIe x16 slot, with another running at x4 speeds, plus 4x DIMM slots that support up to 2600MHz DDR3 memory. Oh, and there are 6x USB 2.0 ports on the back, should you need them.

The key thing here is that you have one PCIe x16 slot to add an AMD Radeon HD 5670 or HD 6670 and pair it up with an A8 APU to enable crossfire. The second important factor here is that there are four DIMM slots, all capable of very high RAM speeds. These are the two most important things one should consider if they’re planning to build a Llano based gaming system; the ECS A55F-A certainly supports that. The SATA III and USB 3.0 is just extra fluff that you can live without if you’re under serious budgetary constraints.

Reviewed: ASUS F1A75-V PRO vs ECS A75F-A vs Gigabyte A75-D3H

Taimoor Hafeez — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 10:58:53 +0000

With the recent release of the new AMD Llano desktop motherboards, there is going to be a whole lot of choice for people to get a motherboard suitable for their needs. Now, Bear in mind that the AMD Llano desktop APUs aren’t exactly powerhouses when it comes to raw performance. They’re mid-range CPUs combined with lower-end GPUs on one die.

This means that you can have playable gaming performance for a resolution of 720p with 30+fps in most modern games, and much higher in older games. Alternatively it also makes one hell of an HTPC processor since it can easily power even the most demanding high-definition video files and Bluray movies with ease. All the while staying extremely cool.

So what I’m looking at today are three motherboards that promise to squeeze out every last drop of performance from your new AMD Llano APU. All of these boards have specific features to improve and enhance your experience and extend the usability of this new platform. So let’s move on to see today’s contenders.

AMD 990FX Review: ASUS Sabertooth 990FX vs ECS A990FXM-A

Taimoor Hafeez — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 09:27:03 +0000

The new AMD 9-series chipsets brings with it the long awaited octa-core CPU support. These new AM3+ motherboards will support any AMD processor all the way till the good old Athlon processors of yore. With the 9-series chipsets, AMD brings support for SATA III (6gbps), PCI 2.0 2×16 lanes or 4×8 lanes, and up to 14 USB 2.0 connections. You will notice that USB 3.0 is sorely missing native support, but then that issue is moot because most motherboard manufacturers will just use a Marvell chip to control that.

Interestingly Nvidia cards can now run in SLI mode, but as I said earlier, the modes available will be 1×16, 2×16:16, 3×16:8:8 and 4×8:8:8:8 lanes in PCIe 2. Of course, the SB950 Southbridge is no slouch, perfectly complimenting the 990FX chipset with most of the I/O operations. It’s interesting to note that in addition for up to 6 SATA III port support, raid modes 0,1,5 and 10 are also supported on the 990FX platform.

Apart from the native support and future-proofing with support for the 32nm Bulldozer based Zambezi 8-core CPUs coming out later this year, there’s not much of an improvement over the 890FX. That means that aside from anything new the motherboard manufacturers choose to add as an extra, the 990FX platform doesn’t bring much new to the table; at least for the existing AMD processors.

For now, let’s take a look at our two contestants for today’s review of the 990FX platform.

ECS GTX 560 vs Zotac GTX 560: Budget cards battle

Taimoor Hafeez — Sun, 26 Jun 2011 12:22:35 +0000

Nvidia has been enjoying the high-end crown for quite some time now with the GTX 570 and 580 series. Their star champion though, the GTX 560 Ti is more on the expensive side. For that price range of $250~ and below, AMD reigns supreme with their HD 6950 cards, going down to HD 6870 and HD 6850 for which Nvidia has absolutely no competition when it comes to price/ performance. And while the GTX 550 Ti proved to be paltry when compared the HD 6790, Nvidia hopes to take advantage of the <$200 market with their recent GTX 560 cards.

Today I’ll be looking at the ECS GTX 560 and the Zotac GTX 560 AMP! Edition cards. While the former card runs at stock speeds, the AMP! Edition moniker obviously shows a super-clocked edition from Zotac’s side, but more on that later.

Coming back to the GTX 560, the idea behind it is simple: take the mainstream GTX 560 Ti, disable a few cores, lower clock speeds, and sell it cheaper. The end result is that the GTX 560 runs on the same GF114 chip as the GTX 560 Ti with the same number of transistors, ROPs and bus bandwidth. However, the GTX 560 has 336 shaders running at 810MHz on the core and 4004MHz on memory; whereas the GTX 560 Ti has 48 more shaders, running at slightly higher speeds. That’s why you pay $50 less. Also, minimum PSU requirements are 450W instead of 500W required for the GTX 560Ti.

ECS H61H2-M Review

Taimoor Hafeez — Tue, 03 May 2011 09:59:03 +0000

Since the launch of the budget Intel H61 platform for the Sandy Bridge processors, I was wondering when the Micro-ATX motherboards will start shipping. After the recently reviewed ECS H61H2-A motherboard, which had pretty decent performance for its price, I’ll be looking at the m-ATX version of the same board.

The ECS H61H2-M comes with the new B3 stepping chipsets, so the deteriorating SATA performance is gone now. What we have here is the new Intel 6 series chipset, with all the basics of a good current generation m-ATX motherboard. Some of the main highlights include having onboard VGA & DVI output, 3x USB 3.0 ports and Dual DDR3 memory support for up to 16GB.

As far as the layout is concerned, the H61H2-M looks like a budget motherboard through and through, which is not to say that its performance and quality are hindered in any way. It’s just a very Plain Jane motherboard with a simple layout and minimalist cooling.

The 6 channel HD audio, 4x USB 2.0 ports, LAN adapter and PS/2 connectors are rounded up with the 4x SATA 2 (3Gb/s) ports to complete the ECS H61H2-M. Of course, there are two PCI slots and a PCIe Gen 2 x 16 slot as well. So there’s nothing remarkable here, but at $70 you shouldn’t be expecting anything out of the ordinary either. USB 3.0 was my only main concern here since using this board in an HTPC would mean faster speeds onceUSB 3.0 external HDDs become commonplace in the near future.

Zotac H67-ITX & ECS H67H2-I motherboards Review

Taimoor Hafeez — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 14:50:37 +0000

So the new Intel Sandy Bridge processors are out in the market in you’re thinking this is probably the best time to work on that HTPC you always wanted to have (or upgrade). Well, look no further as today I’ll be reviewing the Zotac H67-ITX WiFi and the ECS H67H2-I Mini-ITX motherboards.

The first thing to note in the motherboard models is that both of these are H67 boards, so they’re obviously targeted towards the HTPC market, i.e. forget about overclocking anything. Neither is there any space on these motherboards (as you’ll see soon enough) nor in a regular HTPC case for such an endeavor. Heck, even the BIOS of these motherboards doesn’t allow to change the CPU multiplier settings or FSB for that matter. These are simple motherboards designed for the singular purpose of providing acceptable performance in a small form factor and keeping the budget well under control.

Before I begin with the benchmarks, let’s look at the specs and features of these boards. Both of the boards are expected to perform about the same since they are based on the H67 chipset, so I was more interested in seeing which motherboard had more value for money.

ECS to showcase Android and Windows Tablets at CES

Abbas Jaffar Ali — Fri, 24 Dec 2010 07:51:10 +0000

Elitegroup Computer Systems (ECS), a leading Green computer product provider, plans to present a series of power-efficient and environmental friendly designed notebook, eBook Reader and Tablet PC for the up coming CES tradeshow at Mirage Hotel Las Vegas from January 6th to January 8th, 2011.

MB40/50 Series Notebook
The ECS MB40 and MB50 series notebooks support the 2nd Generation Intel® Core™ Processors for unlimited efficiency and productivity. With a HD LED display of 14” or 15” at 1366×768, ECS MB40 and MB50 series notebooks bring presentations to life with bright and crisp color. A 6-in-1 card reader supports popular media card formats. ECS Super POSH features provide optimized options; Super Power (power saving scheme for your system), Super OSD (On-Screen-Display enabled shortcut icon), Super Speed (optimize your system configuration) and Super HDD (detect your system current status).

E Series CMPC
The new Classmate PC employs an Intel® Atom™ processor, 10.1-inch display, up to 160-GB hard drive including both solid-state and disk-drive options, up to 9 hours of battery life and wireless connectivity options including Wi-Fi and WiMax. The device also has a 1.3-megapixel rotating camera and two speaker jacks.

ECS eBook Reader
Along with strong demand of eBook Reader in the market, ECS will showcase its complete eReader product line featuring 9.7”, 8” and 6” with finger touch display in a thin and light design. ECS eReaders support Android and Linux operation system supporting versatile document and audio formats. They also come with WiFi, Bluetooth and 3G wireless connectivity. With ECS eBook Readers, users enjoy music and reading anytime anywhere without sacrificing forests.

ECS Tablet PC
Adapting to the hot topic about Multimedia Tablet in the second half of the year, ECS has also developed a series of smart design of tablet PCs with touch panel in different size from 10.1” to 7” for both Windows® and Android base solutions to fulfill various customer demand. For Windows based tablet, it comes with Intel® Atom™ processor and built-in wireless communication capability with WiFi, Bluetooth and 3.5G. While, for Android based products，it integrates with Marvell or Samsung processor with wireless connectivity. In CES, ECS Tablet PC will definitely gain attention and creates more admiration.

In compliant to ECS corporate philosophy ECS will once more present its Green designs on new products in order to protect the Earth, but, without compromising customer satisfaction. ECS expects bringing people with more Green Touch for a Good Life.

ECS A890GXM-A2 review

Taimoor Hafeez — Thu, 25 Nov 2010 04:13:25 +0000

We initially used the ECS A890GXM-A2 while reviewing the updated AMD X6 1075T and X4 970BE where it performed superbly. Now however, it’s time for the actual motherboard itself to take on the limelight and show us what all it really has.

Being a socket AM3 based motherboard, the ECS A890GXM-A2 will support pretty much any processor released by AMD in the last 2 years, including the latest X6 processors. The specialty here is that it has the ability to unlock some of the hidden cores on some of the Phenom II and Sempron 140 processors through the BIOS itself. Unfortunately we didn’t have any AMD processor from that range otherwise this would have been a really fun little experiment to conduct.

Being a Black Series motherboard, overclocking is something that was factored into the board’s design from inception. So things like dual heat pipes and large fins for heatsinks are quite a common sight. One other interesting thing on the ECS A890GXM-A2 is the onboard AMD HD 4290 graphics chip with 128MB GDDR3 memory onboard. This little card allows you to connect the motherboard to any monitor or TV via VGA, DVI, HDMI or a DisplayPort. A good option for those who just want to use their PC for more computing tasks than gaming, but let’s face it, nobody will buy a Black Series motherboard just for its onboard graphics capability, minuscule as it is. This is why the ECS A890GXM-A2 also features two PCI-e x16 slots for 2-way CrossFire setup.

Apart from all that, the ECS A890GXM-A2 features your, now usual, features like USB 3.0 and SATA 3G (@ 6GBps). Then there are the BIOS and Drivers update utility along with the eJIFFY interface based on LINUX. Think of it like a UI system present in many netbooks and laptops that basically allows you access to the web and IM service. This is, of course, additional software for you to install, so users can skip it entirely if your Windows 7 boots up in 10 seconds on your RAIDed SSDs.

ASUS Crosshair IV Extreme review

Taimoor Hafeez — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 12:13:12 +0000

Every time we get ASUS Republic of Gamers hardware at the Tbreak office, everybody gets excited, and for good reason too. Not once has an RoG hardware failed to impress us, and surely the Crosshair IV Extreme would be no less than its predecessors.

Based on the AMD 890FX/SB850 chipset, the ASUS Crosshair IV Extreme will support any AM3 based Phenom II, Athlon II and Sempron 100 series CPU. Since this is a Republic of Gamers enthusiast motherboard, packed in along with the instruction manual and the drivers CD is an extra eSATA expansion bracket, 3x SATA 6.0GBps cables, 1x SATA 3 cable, 1x USB cable, rear i/o panel cover and an RoG sticker for your case. There’s also a set of voltage reading cables and three additional temperature sensors for the CPU along with a CrossFire cable added in for good measure.

Speaking of CrossFire, the Crosshair IV Extreme has 5x PCIe x16 slots. In a 3-way SLi or CrossFire, 3 of the slots will run at x16 speeds, otherwise in a 4-way SLi or CF setup, 2 slots run at x16 speeds while the remaining 2 run at x8 speeds. Moving up the board we see the sharp looking heatsink on the Southbridge controller as well as the Lucid HYDRA chip. The latter is especially interesting as the Hydra chip allows multiple GPUs from different manufacturers to be run on the Crosshair IV Extreme, i.e. you can run a GTX 580 along with an HD 6870 if you wish. Sadly the HYDRALogiX drivers failed to install (both the one’s supplied with the motherboard and the latest v1.7.102 from their website) so we couldn’t test this feature.

Moving to the top right we see the PCIe switches and the Probelt voltage plugs for simple readings, a process made easier thanks to the included voltage dongles. The 5 PCIe switches turn the corresponding PCIe slots on and off. This greatly helps if you have a multi-GPU setup and want to remove one card for whatever reason (whether it failed or you want to not run an AMD or Nvidia card) then this is far easier than shutting down the PC and unplug the whole card. We always welcome onboard Reset and Start buttons, but the enthusiast nature of the Crosshair IV Extreme shows when there’s an additional CPU core unlocker button on the motherboard itself (right of the Start button).

Just near the CPU plug you can see the Northbridge controller with a mini 40mm fan. Don’t let this little sucker fool you though, it can scream real loud when temperatures start going above 50C.

Current Top 5 Graphics Cards

Taimoor Hafeez — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 11:17:17 +0000

With all the new PC games coming in recently (StarCraft II and Civilization V being prime examples), we think it’s about time we revisit the Top 5 graphics cards in the market right now. Listed below are the cream of the crop, the best money can buy. However, some cards are also the best performance you can afford within your budget. Note that we are not providing specific cards from different manufacturers (e.g. MSI, ASUS, ECS, Zotac, Gigabyte, etc.) as each of these provide the below 5 cards in various configurations and at slightly different clock speeds, cooling solutions and prices from the standard Nvidia and ATI reference cards.

Our main criteria for this list was best performance on a single card, so let’s start things off with…

ATI HD 5970

A year on and the HD 5970 2G is still the best graphics card on market. This is one card that can be easily overclock well beyond factory settings, even outperforming a pair of HD 5870s in CrossFire. Sadly this is also the most expensive card on the list, with a MSRP of $599 but actual retail prices touching around the $700 mark.

Still, the HD 5970 is the best money can buy right now on a single 30cm PCB, and slapping two HD 5850s on a single board is no easy feat. At the end of the day, if you just want one (really huge) card sticking inside your chassis without the hassle of CrossFire, then this is your weapon of choice.