ECS Elitegroup has been around for more then 2 decades and is known to provide our consumers with some of today's most budget friendly motherboards. While ECS has made some extensive improvements over the last few years with its style and design, we also continue to see ECS provide some "easy on money" type products. Today we have the opportunity to look at the ECS A970M-A Deluxe Motherboard. This motherboard is budget friendly while also providing some aesthetic enhancements. The gold and white mixed with the black PCB really makes this board stand out, but the colors alone aren't the only thing that makes this board stand out... As we move forward we get to show you something new that we haven't see with most of today's motherboards. Let's dive in! First, here's a little about ECS Elitegroup.

With the release of AMD's Trinity APU, we are starting to see more and more manufacturers releasing this new FM2 Socket series of motherboards. If you are not familiar with AMD's APU systems, it's a processor that has an on-die graphics processing unit embedded into the CPU. AMD started its APU line just over a year ago with the Zacate series processors which carried the FM1 Socket. AMD released this as their "Fusion" technology, which is designed to combine the CPU with the raw processing power of on-die graphics at an affordable price-point. AMD recently took this "Fusion" technology a little further with its recent release of Trinity, and incorporated its new processing architecture of Piledriver to the new FM2 Socket series chips. In fact, today we will be using the AMD Trinity A10-5800k that offers this new architecture, and takes its graphics processing power to the next level with the on-die 7660D graphics. When it comes to using this new processing power, it's also important to choose the right motherboard that fits the bill. The APU line of motherboards were designed to be affordable, but also offer high performance standards. Today we are going to be looking at a new motherboard from ECS: the A85F2-A Golden Motherboard. This motherboard will follow its A85X (hudson D4) chipset. ECS doesn't call this board the "Golden" board for no reason, and, as we take a closer look, you will see why.

A solid budget board with the 890GX chipset.