AMD's 785G chipset has become the standard for budget conscious users looking to get the best price to performance ratio, while building an AM2+ or AM3 system. Luckily this is easily done, as a 785G motherboard and AMD Phenom II Quad-Core processor combo can be purchased for under $300 and an Athlon II or Sempron can be had for even cheaper, making the price to performance ratio better than almost anything on the market today. Continuing in this trend of performance and affordability, ECS is releasing the A785GM-AD3 motherboard, which comes with the 785G/SB710 chipset combination. Even though the 785G arrives at an affordable price, its support for AM3 processors, DDR3 memory and the integrated HD4200 graphics processor, it is anything but 'cheap'. In fact, the ECS A785GM-AD3 has most of the features you would find on other motherboards with the same chipset such as ATI hybrid graphics, Hypertransport 3.0 and PCI Express 2.0. But ECS has gone a step further and added their "15? Gold Contact" technology. With this technology ECS has effectively added three times the standard amount of gold plating to the contacts of both the CPU and memory areas. This should help ensure the motherboard has a longer life span, better reliability and makes excellent physical contact. With the added life span of this motherboard comes added value, as it could potentially be in use for a long period of time. This is a feature that was on display during the 2010 CES convention and will become available across multiple Intel and AMD platforms. In the last few years ECS has really upped their game with their Black Series motherboards and I am really looking forward to seeing if they can continue this trend.