ECS K7S7AG SiS 746 + Xabre200 Review (8)
Overclocker 22 Dec 2002

In our tests, the overall performance of this board is above average compared to the other boards. This is especially the case in the case of floating point manipulation and multimedia benchmarks. In terms of Content Creation, it performs very well too. The graphics portion dragged down the overall performance of the system unless you overclock it to 230/230.

Feature wise, this board has the necessary features supporting 333/266 SDRAM up to 2GB, CMedia 8738 6 Channel Audio, 6 x USB 2.0 Ports, Onboard 10/100Mbps LAN, SPDIF, IEEE1394, on board Xabre 200 64M graphics. The only disappointment is it didn't provide an AGP slot and 3 PCI slots. Overclocking features are built in with software o/c for the graphics core/memory. The BIOS also provides 1Mhz stepping to adjust the FSB and there are many options for async memory settings. It's a pity that there is no multiplier control and voltage tweaks within the BIOS.

Some improvements that can be done is to remove the double side tape and replace it with thermal paste for both the north south bridge and also the heatsinks on top of the graphics ram.

The bundled provides some interesting software Elite Castle (a 3DNA desktop software with 3D windows interface) and there is the SOU - Smart Overclocking Utility which overclocks the graphics chip on board. On top of that, the package comes with Pc-cillin, WInDVD4, 3Deep, PCDJ and Adobe Acrobat.

Retail price : NA
* pricing based on pricewatch.com and are subjected to changes without notice

Discuss

Below, we list down some pros and cons of this board :

Pros:

• FSB (1mhz stepping)
• OC utility within AGP driver
• USB 2.0
• 1394
• AGP 8x
• LAN

Cons:

• No Vcore, Vdimm, Vagp voltages settings
• No SerialATA
• No RAID
• 2 DIMM slots only
• Poor thermal double side tape
• No AGP Slot

Ratings

Here are my ratings out of 10.

* overclocking results will be added if requested.

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