Performance Test Results
Our first set of benchmarks showed immediately that results from the PF88 Extreme not only lived up to our expectations, but were competitive with other high-end motherboards. In actual use, the PF88 with SiS656 compares favorably to options based on the Intel 915P or 925XE chipsets - any differences observed are small.
However, the PF88 with the SiS756 and an Athlon 64 runs a bit slower than motherboards with nForce4 Ultra or VIA K8T890 chipsets. These results may be explained primarily by Elitegroup’s use of exactly 200.0 MHz as its base clock rate, while many other vendors overclock to some extent.
Also, ECS doesn’t offer enough BIOS options to outperform the competition when it comes to tweaking setting options.
Functionality Test Results
As we’ve already mentioned, the PF88 is a prototype and showed definite signs of a lack of product maturity during testing. We are sure that ECS will fix these problems before final release. Aside from those issues, this hybrid motherboard performs much like more conventional motherboards with similar speeds and feeds.
Without the A9S sister board the PF88 Extreme looks and acts like a well-made Pentium 4 motherboard with decent value-adds. The option settings in the BIOS, however, could provide greater depth of control and coverage. That makes this motherboard fundamentally best-suited for sophisticated users who aren’t interested in overclocking.
So far, ECS hasn’t published a retail price for this motherboard, either. Nevertheless we believe that ECS will price this product somewhat lower than what leading vendors charge for top-of-the-line models. The packaging and materials from ECS are consistent with this belief, and also include a usable 54 Mbps 802.11g wireless LAN interface.
