ECS Black series A-780GM-A pictured

Tags: ECS A-780GM-A black specs details
I'd like Something to go with a Black Phenom, please.

ECS has picked the line from AMD's marketing team, with the release of the first board of the "Black series".

The new motherboard sure appeals the case modder inside me, but those inductors don't. I will forgive the four phase design if they make this one under $100 and throw a proper BIOS to go with it.
The inductors will probably generate some electrical noise in high-load and if you are looking for a cheap board with good ones, look for something with ones looking like this:


They are of better quality, generally, and are also easy to find on cheap boards - this was what ECS should have fitted the board with, if they didn't want to spend some extra on ferrite core inductors.
They saved some for capacitors and placed all solid ones on the PWM area - it's becoming common, but is definitely a plus.
The layout is surprisingly top notch, but the 780G chipset is probably on the look to upgrade it's cooler with something more beefy.

The 780G boards have already proven very good for overclocking the graphics core, but ECS needs to implement these features here as well. It also has the now almost standard HDMI port and a D-sub one, together with an Atheros Gigabit Ethernet port.

This may be a cheap overclocking board to look out for; ECS sometimes does some good boards for that purpose, like the KN1 SLI and the NForce4A-939, although sometimes they screw up pretty bad.
The A770M-A originally had problems with unlocked Black edition CPUs, but recently a BIOS upgrade has fixed that issue.