We stopped off at the offices of motherboard manufacturer ECS here in Taipei, Taiwan, to grab some shots of its latest wares. First, its upcoming AMD 880G motherboard - using a full-size ATX form factor, rather than the micro-ATX which you'd perhaps expect for this chipset.

While it's clearly a budget board, there's still a SB850 Southbridge, as opposed to the older SB750 that some other motherboard companies are considering for a couple of dollars saving. This means you get SATA 6Gbps ports, and more USB 2 ports. There's no USB 3 integrated however - ECS is instead bundling USB 3 with many new motherboards as an extra PCI-E x1 card. It makes sense, because ECS does very well in South America and other developing countries that still demand legacy over latest - so the optional USB 3 card will probably not be sold in those regions.

The 880G is largely identical to the previous 785G chipset - it's still fabricated by TSMC as is evident by the "Made in Taiwan" stamp. Despite the 3+1 power phases the board will have support for upcoming 6-core CPUs, and will also include MOSFET heatsinks, which are not photographed.

Only the basic connectors are included - there's no HDMI output for example - but surprisingly there's also no IDE either. There's also no core-unlocking available either - ECS is still working on that one and didn't know if or when it could be available. No price is stated yet for the board but we don't expect it to cost too much.

Fancy an ECS 880G for a budget build? Or do you think older 785G boards offer still better value? Let us know your thoughts in the forums.