Test System

Initial Setup

Initial setup with the ECS A75F-A was relatively pain-free, except of course, getting our memory to run at 1866 MHz. We ran into this issue with the previous AMD A75 board we looked at, from Biostar, however, unlike the Biostar, ECS makes it pretty obvious things are going to be limited, with a complete lack of secondary timings available. This means, that unless you have memory that either has a JEDEC SPD for 1866 MHz, or one approved by AMD itself, like their currently released and Radeon-branded DDR3 DIMMs, actually getting 1866 MHz memory speeds is going to be quite difficult, if not near impossible. This means, of course, that the maximum memory speed we could get at stock settings was 1600 MHz, which we matched with our DIMM's default timings of 6-8-6-24.

PWM Power Consumption

Since one of our first tasks was to truly verify system stability, while doing so, we measure CPU power consumption. We isolate the power coming through the 8-pin ATX connector using an in-line meter that provides voltage and current readings, as well as total wattage passed through it. While this may not prove to isolate the CPU power draw in all instances, it does serve as a good indicator of board efficiency and effective VRM design.


We were a bit disappointed to see the ECS A75F-A consume a fair bit more power than the other AMD A75-based products we've looked at, but with the VRM design in mind it's easy to understand, and in reality, not that much higher. Under load, we see VRM efficiency come into play yet again, with the ECS A75F-A reporting higher numbers again. We could feel pretty confident that it was VRM efficiency that certainly led to the higher numbers, as the VRM cooler was pretty hot itself, a sure sign the VRM is shedding excess power as heat.