ECS A785GM-M: BIOS And Overclocking
A list of voltage and frequency ranges can be found on page 21 of this review.
The ECS A785GM-M's BIOS team seems to be on a totally different page than the hardware designers. While the board is designed for the enthusiast, the BIOS is unfortunately watered down.
What's the problem? There are no BIOS profiles for starters, which is a painful omission for a board with a clear CMOS button. There is also a lack of memory command rate controls and AMD's ACC feature is completely absent. Worse still is that the BIOS seems to ignore a manual CAS latency setting. When we set the latency to nine, it would revert to seven as shown in CPU-Z. The other settings would take, but not the latency.
When I reported this to ECS, the company sent a special BIOS for testing, which had support for memory command rate and the manual latency settings worked. Now, if ECS can make this BIOS available for download, all of our concerns are moot. But from what we can see, the only BIOS available on its Web site is still the original buggy one. ECS has not yet indicated when a public update will be posted.
In any case, the hardware provided us with very positive results with the unreleased BIOS. A case in point is that the board passed the 1,600 MT/s memory test with flying colors at 7-8-7-20 timings and 1.65V. The only other competing board able to run the memory stable at this speed was the Asus board.
The board did suffer the same issue we saw with the Foxconn Cinema Premium. Mainly, Left 4 Dead and World in Conflict would crash if the game resolution was changed. As with the Foxconn board, the glitch was resolved when the amount of shared IGP memory was set manually in the BIOS, so we set it to the 512MB maximum value.
Overclocking the GPU yielded what seems to be the standard (but still impressive) 900 MHz clock speed. For stability, we had to add +.180mV to the northbridge.
