ECS L4S8A SiS 648 Mainboard Review (1)
Overclocker 10 Oct 2002

It has been sometime since we last review a ECS mainboard. This time round, we review their latest SiS 648 mainboard. As most of us know, ECS is famous for its K7S5A which is widely discussed as the low price alternative for Athlon board. The L4S8A which we are going to see would probably be the next classic of ECS for year 2002.

Don't believe me ? Let's have a run down of its capabilities first. This board that we have here is a breakthrough from ECS's tradition to introduce an overclocking board. So what does it come with. Ok, Voltage tweaking for CPU and DDR are all on L4S8A! Next there is selectable FSB ranging from 100 ~ 200 at 1Mhz steppings.There is also SATA ports for future Serial ATA HD upgrades. This model we have here doesn't come with RAID though. Furthermore you have 6 USB 2.0 ports (2 at the rear and 4 can be connected using extension brackets). There are also 2 x IEEE 1394 connectors on board for supporting your DV devices (need external brackets). 10/100 Mbps LAN is also available on board. There is also the CMedia 9738 audio chipset on board.

So, isn't it something very different from the ECS's traditional design. Definitely. Let's take a look at the gallery.

Specifications

PROCESSORS

Socket 478 supports the Intel® Pentium® 4 processor

CHIPSET

SiS® 648 & SiS® 963 chipset SiS® 963 MuTIOL media I/O Integrated USB 2.0 host controller in SiS® 963 Integrated IEEE 1394A host controller in SiS® 963 LPC I/O: ITE IT8705F LAN: RealTek 8100B (optional) Silcon Image serial ATA RAID controller (optional) AC97 audio codec Compliant with AC97 2.2 specification

SYSTEM BIOS

Award 2Mb flash EEPROM Supports Plug and Play 1.0A, AMP 1.2, multi boot, DMI Support for ACPI V1.0 specification

MEMORY

3 DDR DIMM sockets support 3 2.5V DDR SDRAMs (DDR266/DDR200) or 2 2.5V DDR SDRAMs (DDR333) Maximum: 3GB (2GB only for DDR333)

I/O INTERFACE

Supports Plug and Play function PS/2 keyboard and PS/2 mouse connectors 4 USB ports and an optional LAN connector 1 EPP/ECP mode parallel port 2 16550 high-speed serial I/O ports Audio ports (Line-in, Line-out, Mic-in, CD-in and game port) Supports 8 ATA/ATAPI devices (4 optional) Standard: Dual PCI IDE interfaces - support 4 IDE devices (PIO mode 4, DMA mode 2, Ultra DMA 66/100, 133 for SiS963) Option: 2 serial ATA channels for another devices Supports 360K~2.88M Byte, 3 mode FDDs or LS120 ATX power supply connector Ports, headers and others: IR header (SIR) Front panel Mic./Line-out header 2 IEEE 1394A headers (optional) 2 extra USB ports (USB2) HDD LED, Reset switch, Power switch headers CPU, power switch and case fan headers

RTC & BATTERY

SiS® 963 built-in 256 bytes of CMOS SRAM With CMOS hardware clear jumper

EXPANSION SLOTS

5 PCI slots, 1 8X AGP slot, 1 CNR slot

FORM FACTOR & LAYERS

ATX (305mm*244mm), 4 Layers

Page Index

Introduction
Gallery 1
Gallery 2
Benchmark

• Sisoft Sandra Memory Benchmarks
• Content Creation Winstone 2002
• Business Winstone 2001
• Quake 3 Demo001
• Madonion 3DMark2001SE Build330
• Comanche 4
• Code Creatures Pro

Conclusion

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