ECS A740GM-M AM2+/AM2 AMD 740G Micro ATX AMD Motherboard - Retail

Comment:
Excellent middle of the road board for surfing, email and even playing games such as Reflexive Arcade types when using onboard video. DVD's and Blu-Ray movies play seemless aswell.Myself I added a Radeon 4850 video card and left everything at stock MHz and am playing the latest games on high settings. Installing the included CD's motherboard drivers was simple and had another client watching DVD's and playing games in no time. When I used the onboard LAN I found the gigabit transfer at par with my other adapters. Good buy.

Comment:
About 7-8 years ago, I used to build many systems using ECS boards, including the popular K7S5A board that accepted both SDR and DDR memory. They were poorly made and had relatively high fail rates. After not touching ECS products for the last 7-8 years, I decided to give this board a try, hoping that they had improved. Guess what... same old, same old. Cost-cutting is evident everything on the board. It is very thin and flexes very easily. There is no CPU backplate. The VGA connector is not supported and is easily pushed in. Cheap, no-name capacitors are used for the VRM (although, thank goodness, they are solid capacitors). for a few dollars more, I would recommend the Gigabyte GA-MA74GM-S2 instead. The Gigabyte has Japanese capacitors throughout and is of much higher overall build quality. I have both the ECS and the Gigabyte, and the quality of the Gigabyte is definitely evident and worth it. This review was modfied by poster @ 02-17-09 03:37 PM

Comment:
This was a cheap replacement for a socket a board that fried.It runs great with 2gigs of ram and Athlon 64 X2 4600+ Dual Core Processor. It is only going to be used for web surfing. Not much good for anything else.