The ECS K7S7AG is a budget all in one motherboard with a unique twist. This board has on board graphics in the most literal sense. ECS have stuck an SIS Xabre 200 graphics card, RAM and all, onto the motherboard. The area that normally contains the AGP and top 3 PCI slots is occupied by the Xabre 200 GPU, with a little heatsink and fan on top, and 64MB of DDR video RAM, hidden under a couple of ramsinks. It uses the SIS 746 northbridge, mated to an SIS 963 southbridge. It supports a 166mhz front side bus, DDR400, and runs the Xabre GPU on an 8X AGP bus.

Features

The feature list is fairly comprehensive for a board in this price range. There is no AGP slot, only 3 PCI slots and a CNR riser. Also onboard are 4 USB 2.0 ports, with 2 more on a motherboard header. There is no cable supplied to make use of these ports on the motherboard, but one of them at least will not go to waste, as ECS have thrown in a nice little card reader device that plugs into it. It fits in a floppy drive bay, and has 4 slots for various types of media, Compact Flash, Smartmedia, Sony memory sticks, and Secure Digital memory cards. These things will set you back £20 in the shops, so it was a nice surprise to find it bundled with this budget board. Apparantly, all their boards will be shipping with these from now on. Along the side of the box is printed "optional" with Firewire, 10/100 Ethernet, and 6 in 1 card reader written beneath, with tick boxes beside them. There was no Firewire on this board, but the Ethernet option was included. There is 6 channel AC97 compatible sound on board as standard, which to my admittedly untrained ear, sounds perfectly good.

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