Biostar TA780G M2+ and ECS A780GM-A: value products of wide capabilities
Layout, expansion options
Biostar TA780G M2+ is made in the microATX form factor, whereas ECS A780GM-A is made in the ATX format. At the same time, both the boards offer approximately the same feature sets.
To cool the north bridge, both the motherboards use only small aluminum radiators without fans.
As compared to the previous integrated AMD (690G) chipset, we note a substantially lower heat emission level. Moreover, the installed radiators provide acceptable cooling even in overclocking.
The motherboards have four 240-pin DIMM slots for DDR2 memory modules each, with the overall supported memory capacity being 8 GB.
Both the motherboards offer a single PCI Express x16 slot each. Recall that the AMD 780G chipset supports the PCI Express specification of version v2.0.
Apart from the õ16 slot, the Biostar board uses one more PCI Express x1 slot, as well as two PCI slots. The ECS board has two slots more than that: two PCI Express x1, and three PCI slots.
Both the motherboards use the SB700 south bridge with a radiator. In the end, the boards support six SerialATA II ports and one ParallelATA link each.
Therefore, as many as 8 hard disks (6 SATA II + 2 PATA) altogether can be plugged in to each of the boards. By the way, one of the SATA ports on the ECS board is brought over to the rear panel.
Then, the south bridge SB700 supports 12 USB 2.0 ports (and even two more USB 1.1 ports). However, 12 ports are installed on the ECS board only (six - on the rear panel, and six more - with brackets), whereas for some reason the engineers at Biostar have confined to the installation of ten ports (four - on the panel, and six - with brackets).
As regards the audio subsystem, the ECS board implements the 8-channel HD-system based on the IDT 92HD206 codec. As regards Biostar, the engineers have made their lives easier through installation of a 6-channel system based on the ALC662 chipset.
Now a few words on the network support: both the motherboards use a high-speed Gigabit Ethernet LAN controller. On the Biostar motherboard, this is the Realtek RTL8111C chip, on the ECS - the ATHEROS L1.chip.
The board's rear panel is of the following configuration:
On the Biostar board, there is one parallel port and one COM port; on the ECS board - only one COM port. However, as is well seen on the photo, engineers of the companies have implemented outdated ports with additional brackets (which are missing in the bundle). Instead of them, there are outputs of the integrated video core: VGA and DVI - on the Biostar board, VGA and HDMI - on the ECS board (there is no HDMI to DVI adapter in the package bundle). Frankly, we disliked both the configurations; the most correct approach is to install all the three types, and the user will choose whatever he needs. We also note that the panel of the ECS board is much more functional: six ports, as well as one SATA II port.
Here is the components layout of the Biostar board (we failed to find such a layout for the ECS board).
Now on to the BIOS settings.
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MoBo:
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VGA Card:
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CPU & Memory:
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