ECS's 915-A Mainboard

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	ECS 915P-A
CPU Support	All LGA775 processors, except the 3.46 and 3.73GHz Extreme Editions.
Northbridge	Intel i915GV
Memory Support	4 slots. 2 x DDR (DDR400 max), 2 x DDR-II (DDR533 max), 2GB max for each type
AGP	AGP 'Express'
PEG	One 16X electrical slot, 2 lanes attached from ICH6, marked as PCI Express Lite
Southbridge	Intel ICH6
Audio	Realtek ALC880 HD Audio CODEC from ICH6 feed
Audio Connectivity	8 port backplane analogue speaker
PCI Conventional	2 x 32-bit 33MHz PCI 2.3 slots
PCI Express	2 x 1X slots
IDE	1 ATA133 compliant port from ICH6
IDE RAID	None
SATA	4 ports from ICH6
SATA RAID	None
Networking	Realtek 8110C Gigabit Ethernet Controller, 10/100Mibit
USB	ICH6/R, 4 x backplane USB2.0
FireWire	None
Other I/O	VGA, PS/2, Parallel, 1 x Serial, floppy

Use of the Intel i915GV core logic is what really defines the 915-A's feature set. At first glance, it's hard to spot the difference between 915G and 915GV. 915GV doesn't support a 16 lane PCI Express bundle for routing to a PEG16X electrical slot, for graphics. With that electrical slot physically present on the 915-A, you'll notice the lanes routed to the slot, of which there are only two, are provided by the ICH6 I/O southbridge processor rather than the 915GV northbridge.

It also supports an AGP 4X/8X electrical slot, conjured up by similar black majiks (the bonding of two PCI hosts from the ICH6), so for the CPU to communicate with any discrete graphics card, be they in the faux-AGP slot or the PEG16X slot with only 2 lanes routed to it, the communication has to go via the 266MiB/sec Intel Hub link between i915GV and ICH6, since everything discrete graphics wise is connected to the ICH6.

With Intel's GMA900 graphics processor - 4 pixel pipeline DX9.0 part at 333MHz - on the i915GV silicon, too, you've got a wealth of graphics options to make use of on the ECS 915-A, although none of them are optimal, for various reasons.

Outside of graphics, there's the usual round of features that define current generation Pentium 4 mainboards. There's four SerialATA ports for connecting disks, one ATA port for hard disks or optical drives, Intel's High Definition Audio support via an ACL880 CODEC and plenty of USB2.0.

So on the surface, an intriguing board built using Intel's cheapest and most feature-free i915G variant, which nevertheless strives to implement as much in the way of graphics connectivity as ECS's engineers can extract, along with the dual memory formats and an LGA775 socket. Obviously not a board for the

[Pages]
   Last Page
   [1]· Introduction
   [2]· ECS's 915-A Mainboard
   [3]· Layout
   [4]· BIOS
   [5]· Presentation, Bundle and Manual
   [6]· System Setup and Notes
   [7]· Memory Tests
   [8]· ScienceMark 2.0 Primordia, We Crypto, Realstorm 2004
   [9]· Kribibench, MP3 Encoding, Cinebench 2003, PicColor v4.0
   [10]· Thoughts
   Next Page



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