Review: ECS 760GX-M Socket 754 Micro ATX Motherboard

The ECS 760GX-M is an inexpensive Micro ATX motherboard supporting the AMD Sempron 64 and Athlon 64 Socket 754 processors. As is typical of Micro ATX boards, the 760GX-M comes complete with onboard video, LAN, and audio. It accepts up to 2 GB of DDR400 memory in its two 184-pin slots and has three PCI slots and a single AGP 8X/4X slot as well.

This board is very easy to assemble since a system can be built without adding any PCI or AGP cards -- while still leaving open the option to expand or enhance it later. With video, audio, and Fast Ethernet all onboard, there is little else to buy or assemble to build a complete system. The all-in-one nature of this board will save you both time and money.

Further speeding up the build process are the color coded front panel pin headers and slots. Most boards have tiny print designating the front panel pin headers which can be impossible to read without a flashlight. All boards should include the color coding feature and dispense with one of the minor annoyances of building up a system.

The 760GX-M comes in the Micro ATX form factor which will fit in a wide variety of compact and slimline desktop cases, as well as normal full-size ATX cases. While not exactly small form factor boxes, there are several slim Micro ATX mini-towers fit nicely on top of a desktop -- without dominating the view.

Of course, there are also some compromises in this board due to its small size. Finger clearance for installing the CPU heatsink is minimal due to encroachment from a chipset heatsink and the proximity of the memory slots and there are only two DIMM slots.

Onboard sound and video is adequate for most purposes. For gaming use and special purposes, of course, you might need to add an AGP video board or a sound card.

Support for the inexpensive Sempron 64 Socket 754 chips lets you configure a fast system for very little money; price/performance is excellent when the 760GX-M is combined with one of the cheaper Sempron 64's.

Support for Cool'n'Quiet lets the system slow the CPU down during periods of low activity. When more CPU cycles are required, the processor speed is automatically stepped back up so you never notice the slowdown. The net effect of Cool'n'Quiet is less heat and power consumption. Used in conjunction with variable speed fans, the system will be considerably quieter, as well.

On the downside, there are few overclocking controls on this board. While you can adjust memory latencies, Hyper Transport settings, and CPU and I/O slot frequencies, this is not the board for overclocking.

Native RAID support is included for SATA drives. RAID level 0 (striping only) is provided for performance improvement and RAID level 1 (disk mirroring) is available for increased security through redundancy. Note that to use RAID on this motherboard you must have two SATA drives, preferably identical. Unfortunately, only one SATA cable and power adapter is included in the bundle.

The onboard RAID controller also supports disk spanning. This enables you to concatenate two drives so that they appear to the operating system as a single, larger drive. Obviously, there is no speed or data security advantage to spanning, which the manual refers to as JBOD mode.

The 760GX-M is an excellent foundation for a budget 64-bit system. With functional video and audio onboard, support for the inexpensive Socket 754 Athlon 64 and Sempron, and support for the IDE drives you probably already have, this motherboard will let you save money in several ways while still building a 64-bit capable, fast machine. When you're ready to upgrade to SATA drives for RAID or a new AGP video card, this board will upgrade smoothly.