ECS A780GM-A v1.0

[deanjo]

I have the GigaByte Ga-MA78... with the same chipset and i'm having some sort of weird problem with the video playback. When the picture is moving (e.g. camera angle changes) i get horizontal stripes almost like interlacing.
I tried ubuntu, gentoo and windows. Windows gets it right but with linux it happens no matter which player or videoout module I use. Xv, X11, opengl...

Can anyone confirm this or tell me how to fix it?

Eisman

The ATI driver forums would probably be a better place to ask that.

[Luis]

First, thanks for the review, much appreciated.

From the article:

With the ECS A780GM-A we hadn't experienced any Linux issues but it had worked out of the box with Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Beta.

How should we understand the "no Linux issues" thing? Does it mean: "The system boots correctly to a full desktop and sound and networking work correctly"? Or does it include: "Video playback, Compiz and suspend-to-ram work without issues"? That kind of info would be nice.

Thanks.

[parannoyed]

Apparently there's an issue with adding an additional video card in the PCI Express slot.

This board worked beautifully for me, until I tried to add another adapter (ATI HD 3450), at which point the kernel (2.6.24-19-generic SMP Ubuntu on an Athlon 64X2 dual core) panics immediately. Disabling the onboard adapter in the BIOS resolves the panic ("Disable" SurroundView) and allows you to use the PCI-E card without any additional problems. It's not a hardware issue as far as I can tell (XP works).

It seems a little odd to me that the Linux kernel would go so far as to panic on something that seems mildly trivial to me. I looked for info on the issue (Google) and came up quite short. I guess that because ATI hasn't implemented the Crossfire/Hybrid features (except on "select" products), that no one even tries (including kernel devs/testers).

[jhansonxi]

I'm thinking of buying a few of these but the reviews have conflicting specs about the use of solid capacitors. The ECS page for the A780GM-A doesn't mention it. Can anyone confirm that it has solid caps?