Heatsink and Fan

The heatsink is only 26mm high, and fitted with a no-name 60mm fan pushing around 20cfm of air. It runs very cool, probably due to the good thermal interface between die and sink. I was surprised to find that the base of the sink was quite flat, and fairly smooth, with a thin coating of a very liquid white silicone thermal goop. Since the purpose of a thermal compound is to fill any gaps in the heatsink, thus maximizing the surface area in contact with the die, seeing that the thermal goop had mostly been squeezed out of the die area was a good indication that it was making good contact. It was nice to see ECS has taken the trouble to do this right, rather than slapping on one of those horrible hard thermal interface pads that are about as thermally conductive as a sock.

The sink is held down by a metal clip, bolted to a pair of brass pillars fastened to the board. The bolts holding the sink down, and the long self tapping screws that fasten the fan on were all covered in that glue that manufacturers put on fasteners when they want to keep people from fiddling. Fitting a larger heatsink would be easy, if you could find one with a base the same thickness. The bolt down mechanism works very well, there is no risk of chipping the die, since the clip is symmetrical, it does not act as a lever on the die. If only AMD had thought about this when they drew up the socket A specifications, and made both sides of the hold down clip equal distances from the centre of the die. The main fault with the cooling is the fan itself. It is cheap and a little noisy, making an obnoxious whine. It has the feel of a fan that will promptly fail when the warranty expires.

BIOS, Software, and Documentation.

The ECS K7SOM+ claims to have a "PRO 1800+" processor, at least according to the BIOS, and the sticker on the CPU fan. However, according to the printing on the die itself, it is a 1200mhz morgan core AMD Duron CPU. I am not a fan of marketspeak and fancy labels, but this is downright misleading. A less tech savvy person could even mistake it for an XP 1800+. The 1800 is a number so meaningless it could have come from the mouth of a politician. The rest of the BIOS is more or less as standard, with every option you could need, except overclocking options. The driver software isn't as good unfortunately. When I ran the driver installer, the main installer program hung, but the individual installation processes carried on happily. It did get all the drivers installed properly, but it needed a three fingered salute to make it behave. I was running a freshly installed copy of XP pro, and using only generic peripherals, so I am fairly sure there is a bug in the installer somewhere, which I hope will be found and squished as soon as possible. In fairness to ECS, the installation software was written by SiS. The thing that irks me the most about the driver installation was that it changed my wallpaper to some silly 3d rendered image. The manual is concise and well written, with 36 pages of English. It offers some good advice for less experienced users, but still includes pinouts, specifications, and all the technical details you might need.

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