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Untitled Document
Layout
The board is a nice purple colour, and has the feel of a high quality board, with
heatsinks on everything, even the southbridge. The corners of the board are rounded
off, which is a nice touch that I have never seen before. Component and connector
placing is reasonable, with the IDE connectors low down and parallel to the edge
of the board, and plenty of room around the 2 DIMM slots. There is a suprising
amount of room around the CPU socket, a Thermalright AX7 fitted with room to spare.
ECS have included the 4 mounting holes, which are so often omitted on cheaper
boards. The power connectors are placed logically, close to the CPU, GPU, and
northbridge, but unfortunately they are on the wrong side of the CPU socket, and
may result in having cables crossing the CPU fan area. The floppy drive connector
seems to be an afterthought, located almost at the back edge of the board.
Testing
This board includes pretty much everything you could ask of a budget motherboard,
apart from perhaps an AGP slot. But who needs one if the Xabre can perform?
I set up a testbed system with an XP1600+ (1.4gig), 512MB of Kingmax DDR400,
(many thanks to overclock.co.uk for
supplying this), a Sparkle 400watt PSU, a Maxtor ATA66 hard drive, and a generic
CDROM and floppy. This all booted up fine, then a message flashed up warning
me I had no CPU fan, and it promptly shut down again. Becuase the fan I was
using was on a Molex, I had to find a 3 pin fan and plug it into the CPU fan
header to cure the problem. There seemed to be no option in the bios to prevent
it from doing this, which was suprising as the bios was otherwise fairly comprehensive.
Perhaps ECS will release a BIOS update with this function as Abit had to when
they first implemented this function.
Performance and overclocking
Once Windows XP was all fired up and drivers installed, I gave 3dmark a run.
I was very surprised when it returned 5989 marks - this was twice what I had
expected, it seems the AGP 8X and the real video ram set it apart from all the
other onboard graphics solutions on the market. Even more astonishing was that
the standard video drivers included an overclocking option! The GPU went from
200mhz to 225, and the ram did the same. With the CPU clocked to 1.75gig on
a 166fsb, and the memory timings set to CAS 2t "ultra" I squeezed
7005 3dmarks out of it, putting it in the same sort of territory as the Radeon
9000, and destroying the mere 2935marks scored by the nforce2 onboard graphics
(Albatron KM18G PRO motherboard, 1.75 cpu, 166fsb 166ram). The BIOS includes
some overclocking options, notably mhz by mhz FSB adjustment up to 199mhz. Unfortunatly
there are no CPU voltage settings available at all, and CPUs must be fully unlocked
to use the multiplier adjustment. Memory timings, CAS latency and clock are
adjustable.
This board is a fairly good overclocking candidate for those who are happy
to settle for a mild FSB overclock for quick and easy results, but those who
demand more will have to start chopping and changing CPU bridges, or look elsewhere
for a board. The northbridge cooling is minimal, with just the sort of heatsink
you might find on a KT133a based board.
However, it runs stone cold at 166mhz, due to a combination of airflow from
the CPU fan, and the low power consumption of the SIS chipset. The GPU has a
more than adequate heatsink and fan, and the ramsinks on the graphics memory
and the southbridge sinks seem superfluous given their minimal power output.
Better safe than sorry seems to be the thinking behind all these heatsinks,
and it certainly makes a refreshing change from the slapdash approach to cooling
we have all seen to often.
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