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ECS RD480-A939 Motherboard
Friday, March 10, 2006
This ECS motherboard is for budget conscious gamers. The
board supports AMD Athlon 64/FX/X2 processors and has 1GHz FSB. It is an ATi
Cross Fire board, which means that you can put two parallel PCIe graphic cards
of Cross Fire edition. The Cross Fire technology is currently supported by the
Windows XP SP2 and XP Pro 64 bit OS only, therefore, make sure that your graphic
card drivers support the ATi Cross Fire technology. The motherboard has two
slots each of PCIe x16, PCI and PCIe x1. It also has 8 USB and 4 SATA ports and
supports RAID. It supports 6-channel audio for the music enthusiasts.
| Price: Rs 5,000 (2 yrs
warranty) |
| Key Specs: ATi Cross
Fire Support |
| Contact: Cyberstar
India
, Bangalore
Tel: 51266808
Email: ripunjay@cyberstarindia.com
RQS# E33 or SMS 130333 to 9811800601
|
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We tested the motherboard with the nVidia 7800GT and 7800
graphics cards. Though we were able to install the OS with these cards, the
machine couldn't boot up after installation. Then we tried the ATi graphics
card X1300, and strangely, it worked perfectly. Does this mean that ATi is
making its board incompatible with nVidia cards? We didn't find it documented
anywhere, and surely hope that ATi is not getting into such a practice. We
tested the motherboard with a single ATi Radeon X1300 graphics card, AMD Athlon
64 FX -55 processor with 1GB DDR 400 RAM and 120GB SATA HDD. The benchmarks used
were SYSmark04 SE for Office and
Internet applications, 3Dmark 05 for graphics and DOOM 3
for gaming. In SYSmark, the board's performance was great at 214 compared to
the 194 score of MSI RD480 motherboard (also reviewed in this issue). 3Dmark
gave a score of 2878 which was higher than the MSI RD480 score. The DOOM 3 mark
score was also higher than the MSI board at 38.2 fps at 1024x786
resolution.
Bottom Line: Compared to MSI RD480 motherboard this
is obviously the better choice for ATi connoiseurs, both performance and
price-wise.
Anubhav Verma
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