ECS A885GM-A2 Motherboard Review

👤by James Clewer  Comments 📅25-07-10

Board up close continued

Just below are the five SATA III sockets. These are fully 6Gb/s compliant and four of them are conveniently 90 degree designs for easy connection when a large GPU is installed. The fifth isn't fouled by a large graphics card so can be orientated upwards like this.

SATA III 6Gb/s.

Next to these we find the very compact and low profile Southbridge heatsink. Like others I've seen recently it certainly won't obstruct any larger GPU's - it should also cool that SATA 6.0Gb/s chip perfectly well.

Southbridge.

A broader viewpoint shows the uncluttered layout at the base of the board. To the furthest left of the image we see the front panel connector pins and just above those we see the USB power jumper in yellow and the clear CMOS jumper in red.

Uncluttered board design.

Moving along the bottom of the board we see the three USB headers, one of the boards three 3-pin fan headers and another USB power jumper in yellow.

Plenty of USB connectivity on offer.

The A885GM-A2 carries a decent selection of expansion slots with two of each. We get two standard PCI slots, two PCI-E x1 slots and two full length PCI-E x16 slots (the second only runs at x4 remember). With the average mid range dual GPU setup the latter will be perfectly useful for power users - the 2nd generation PCI-E means the slot runs the equivalent of a 1st generation x8 slot which is perfectly adequate for midrange cards. In this regard the ECS board allows for the use of dual ATi cards in full crossfire configuration. Utilising two of their dual GPU designs will result in a quad crossfire setup however the power of such a card would be severely compromised by that second x4 slot. Also of note in this picture is the boards BIOS battery which nestles between the boards two PCI-E x16 slots.

Expansion slots.

Last but not least is the I/O plate which contains mouse and keyboard PS2 connectors (old school!), VGA and DVI connectors supported by the HD4250 and hybrid crossfire, six USB 2.0 sockets, a gigabit LAN socket and the obligatory sockets for full multi channel HD audio.