With its latest Black Series product, ECS focused on providing great bang for the buck. The board is based on DDR2 memory and the ICH10R southbridge, so it supports RAID 5 on all six of its SATA 3 Gb/s ports as well. An additional JMicron JMB361 controller provides one eSATA port and an UltraATA/133 channel for legacy devices such as optical drives. The board comes with a plethora of overclocking features and a four phase voltage regulator. This is a fairly conservative move, especially in light of Gigabyte’s "virtual" 12-phase implementation on its EP45-DQ6 motherboard, but four phases is sufficient to run even a Core 2 Extreme Edition quad-core processor. However, ECS does not yet offer any power saving solutions like Asus, Gigabyte or MSI do.
The board does not come with a huge heat pipe solution, multiple network ports or sophisticated voltage circuits for the main memory. But it is still a fully featured P45 motherboard with quality components that delivers all of Intel’s features and provides great value for a mainstream user who isn’t going to overclock his or her system. It does offer two PCI Express 2.0 slots, which will run a pair of ATI CrossFireX-compatible graphics cards with eight PCIe 2.0 lanes each.
- Eaglelake Has Landed
- P45 Express Chipset Details
- ICH10 Southbridge
- Options: P35, X38, X48
- P45 Boards
- Asus P5Q-E
- ECS Black Series P45T-A
- Gigabyte GA-EP45-DQ6
- Jetway HI04
- MSI P45D3 Platinum
- MSI P45 Diamond
- Overclocking
- Test Setup
- Benchmarks and Settings
- Performance Benchmark Results
- Application Benchmarks
- Audio/Video Benchmarks
- Synthetic Benchmarks
- Synthetic Benchmarks, Continued
- USB 2.0 Performance
- Storage Performance
- SATA I/O Performance
- RAID 0+1 I/O Performance
- RAID 5 I/O Performance
- Power Consumption Results
- Conclusion
