While most of the companies are trying to attack the ECS entry level market, ECS is moving up market by introducing ECS PF1 which breaks away ECS's tradition of manufacturing entry level boards. ECS PF1 can be said as one of the ECS's top notch boards for year 2003. Although the exterior packaging has room for improvement,  the package is well equipped with accessories that you will need.

In our tests, we ran the board using a P4 3.0C with HT enabled. RAM timings was set to CAS 2, 5-2-2. We ran the usual benchmarks and the Distributed Folding client which stresses the system a lot. It never fails and is stable.

This board has some important features. PCI Extreme, one of the Photon Genius elements, features a superior OS-con capacitor on board providing ultra outstanding signal quality. This special PCI slot in yellow color is designed for a home theater builder to plug in audio and video cards. Other custom- designed Photon Genius features include EZ Flash for saving or altering BIOS settings, a "streamlined" IDE cable that provides style as well as better air ventilation for cooler operations and EZ Match color coding to expedite connections. The bundled double-faced cable comes with one 1394 and two USB ports that can be swapped with the front side 3.5-inch external bay. The exclusive design provides outstanding convenience with its front-side connectivity that eliminates the need to reach to the rear of the computer for additional peripheral connectivity. The board also comes with 3COM 940 Gigabit LAN, 8 USB ports(4 by optional cable), 2 Serial ATA / 150 connectors etc.

Installation of this board is quite easy with the help of the colour encoded front panel connectors. In terms of overclocking, we tried to run our P4 2.4C which can easily reach 250Mhz fsb. ECS PF1 provides voltage adjustments for DIMM to 2.8v and a large range of FSB to choose from.

This board provides a range of FSB that you could choose from. 100~350 MHz is selectable. Ram timings are selectable (see gallery). The board only supports up to 2GB of DDR.

Overall, the ECS PF1 is a package that you can consider if you intend to purchase a board that can serve you for the next few years.

Suggested Retail : US160

Discuss

Pros 好处:

• Top Hat Flash
• Gigabite LAN
• 6 Channel audio
• USB 2.0 
• Overclocking

Cons 坏处:

• No SATA RAID
• No IDE RAID

Ratings

Here are my ratings out of 10 stars.

Innovation Award