ECS N2U400-A definitely has good performance. In fact in our tests, though with a slightly slower ram timings, we noticed that the performance is definitely not very far from the fastest NF2 boards out there from big players like Gigabyte, DFI and EPoX.

This board only provides a very basic feature set-  USB 2.0, Ethernet, 6 channel audio. There is no RAID, no SATA, no 1394. It is too basic but this is good as it will be less prone to compatibility issues.

Installation of this board is straightforward as it is all well documented on board or in the manual. The only thing I feel that could be improved the DIMM slots. It is way too tight. The colour coded front panel is definitely a good one for users who are not sure which pins which connector goes to.

In terms of overclocking, this board has only has a FSB range of up to 232Mhz. There are no voltage adjustments at all and the board does not come with any multiplier control which is really a pity since it could have implemented all this into the BIOS to make this one of the best sellers!

For stability, our best aggressive timing is CAS 2, 6-3-2 with 2 pieces of Kingston Value RAM which are Winbond BH-5 chips. In fact, we remove that double sided tape from the chipsets heatsink and replaced it with thermal paste. The South Bridge is hot and we added a heatsink on it as well. We also noticed that setting Tras to 11 resets it to 3. This seems to be a bug of the official BIOS 1.0b. The board posted even at 215MHz FSB at CAS 2, 6-3-2 but ends up in a blue screen. Looks like a MOD is necessary if you really want to overclock it.

Overall, if you are one that do not overclock and wants to get something cheap and works well at the rated SPD settings, this board serves the purpose well. If you want to overclock the board, the first thing you might to consider is to enable the multiplier control and increase your Vdimm, Vcore through some modifications to the board.

Suggested Retail : US58.00 (Click link for more pricing)

Discuss & read more

Pros 好处:

• 6 Channel audio
• USB 2.0 
• Colour encoding of front panel

Cons 坏处:

• No Voltage Adjustments
• FSB range up to 232
• Ram Slots a bit tight
• No RAID
• No 1394
• No SATA

Ratings

Here are my ratings out of 10 stars.