ECS A785GM-M: Features And Hardware
ECS' A785GM-M is an interesting product with a handful of unique features. A microATX offering in the enthusiast-friendly Black-series of boards, it sports full 140W CPU support in addition to 1,333 MT/s DDR3 capabilities (although we were able to push that significantly higher). ECS chose to exclude SidePort memory on this model. Perhaps it anticipates enthusiasts running discrete graphics cards.
The board's bundle is fairly standard, except that it includes four SATA cables. Other than this, there's the requisite driver CD, an eJiffy installer CD, an I/O shield, an installation reference card, and an IDE cable.
Other features include ECS eJiffy (a light Linux distribution that features a Web browser, photo access, and on-line chat with an eight second boot-up time) and M.I.B. II (ECS' BIOS tweaking utility).
Placement of components on the board is ideal, except for a few minor nitpicks. The 24-pin ATX power connector is a little high up on the PCB for bottom-mounted PSUs, and the SATA cables shoot out the side of the board to save space (this would actually help preserve SATA connectivity with a long discrete graphics card installed). But other than that, there's little to complain about.
Connectivity is good for a microATX board, with a 16x PCIe 2.0 slot, two 1x/4x PCIe slots, and a single legacy PCI slot.
ECS is the only manufacturer who got it right when it comes to on-board buttons. In addition to power and reset, there is a clear CMOS button as well. Overclocking this board is made easier with no CLR CMOS jumper to mess around with. There is also a diagnostic readout, and the platform sports an on-board speaker.
