The mainboard has three PCI slots for expansion cards and a PCI Express x16 slot for an external (additional) graphics card. The chipset’s North Bridge is capped with a passive heatsink. The manufacturer thinks this will suffice to cool a 0.13-micron ATI RS480 chip, but we disagree. This IGP would overheat in our tests when the graphics load was high. So, you will need an additional chipset fan or a well-ventilated system case for the ECS RS480-M to work normally.

The small heatsink on the South Bridge conceals an ATI SB400 chip, one of the earliest South Bridges ATI developed for the Radeon Xpress 200 chipset. Unlike the more up-to-date SB450 chip, the SB400 does not support High Definition Audio, and this is why the sound capabilities of the ECS RS480-M are implemented through an ordinary AC?7 codec (Realtek ALC655). Two Parallel ATA and four Serial ATA channels as well as eight USB 2.0 ports are implemented on the mainboard by means of the chipset’s South Bridge. ATI’s chipset doesn’t include a network controller, so the mainboard carries an external Fast Ethernet controller Realtek RTL8100C that supports data-transfer rates of 10/100Mbps.

The mainboard’s rear panel has a D-Sub connector for connecting a monitor, one parallel and one serial port, PS/2 connectors for the keyboard and mouse, an RJ-45 network connector, four High-Speed USB ports and three audio inputs/outputs.

The mainboard is overall cleverly designed, considering its MacroATX form-factor. The ECS engineers managed to arrange properly a number of slots, connectors and chips on a very small PCB. You should not find it difficult to assemble the ECS RS480-M in your system case.

The overclocking opportunities provided by this mainboard (and very rare for products of that class, we should add) need to be mentioned. The mainboard’s BIOS allows you to adjust the clock-generator frequency from 200 to 250MHz, to reduce the CPU frequency multiplier, and to control the CPU VID parameter to lift the CPU voltage up to 1.55V. The DIMM voltage can also be increased up to 2.85V.

The mainboard also supports Cool’n’Quiet technology, an indispensable function for small home PCs that are expected to work as quietly as possible.