Board-Revision: 1.0

P4 BIOS-Version: 416 (4/16/2005)
Athlon BIOS-Version 415 (4/15/2005)

At first glance, the presence of several additional slots, compared to other motherboards, is apparent. For example, there are two x16 PCIe slots on this board, along with a third PCIe-format slot that's longer than usual, and trimmed with jumpers. Finally, there's an additional adapter card - or sister board - called the A9S that accommodates an Athlon 64 CPU (more about this later). The adapter card, however, has to be purchased separately.

Otherwise, the PF88 looks and behaves like a normal, motherboard in most respects. Because Elitegroup has made the PF88 a member of its Extreme motherboard family, the product is targeted for PC enthusiasts. This explains the many built-in value-adds: 7.1 sound support and Gbit Ethernet are obligatory nowadays, plus an extra SATA-II controller from Silicon Image (Sil3132) that offers two additional SATA ports and an UltraATA/100 channel. The Southbridge can accommodate four SATA ports. A SiS965 Southbridge connects to either a SiS756 Northbridge for an Athlon 64 CPU on the sister board or a SiS656 for its Pentium 4 counterpart.

The motherboard only makes a few additional BIOS options available for which ambitious users might yearn. While CAS-latency does appear in the options menu, other system parameters aren't available for tweaking purposes.

Our prototype also appeared to suffer from teething troubles: for example, when we updated the BIOS we were forced to manually re-enter all settings. Equally frustrating, during startup, the BIOS often couldn't recognize our SATA hard drives (we used WD740 Raptors on our test machine). ECS' BIOS team is aware of this bug and is about to fix it. Likewise, we fervently wished for recovery mode support that could recover from a failed configuration, and that was also smart enough to revert to the last known working setup automatically.

The connector for auxiliary power sits too close to this coil. We had to gently lift the security latch with a flathead screwdriver before we could disconnect the cable. Board revision 1.1 will change this.

The Sis965 serves both actual Northbridge chipsets in place: the SiS765 for the Athlon 64, and the SiS656 for the Pentium 4.

Whoops! Dual "CHannal" is a typo we found on our early-run prototype.