ECS 755-A2 (SiS755) Review (1)
Bluetooth 20 Jan 2004

Introduction

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Early this year, we reviewed the ECS NF2 mainboard which is quite a well built board. Today, we take a look at the first retail SIS 755 K8 mainboard that has made its way to our labs right before Chinese New Year. We took time off from our busy schedule to give it a look before we take our yearly break in the next few days.

As we know, ECS is well known for its good cost/performance ratio. ECS 755-A2 is definitely the board that most SIS supporters are waiting for. From our few days of working with the 755-A2, I personally feel that the board would be the next K7S5A or L7S7A2. Apart from the standard IDE connectors, this board supports SATA RAID 0 or 1 with 2 SATA HDDs.

At first glance, the ECS 755-A2 looks like any plain old ECS boards we have seen so far. This board is less cluttered with the power connectors all on one corner of the board. As we normally do, we removed the double sided tape underneath the NB heatsink and replaced it with thermal paste and an active heatsink/fan.

As we knew from our readers that bought the 755A, 755-A2 does not have any of those memory performance issues faced by our 755-A readers. So far, we are getting very good results and it is comparable or faster compared to the SiS 755 Ref board. This is amazing as the ref board and the ECS 755-A2 are all running at 199.9 and 200.0 MHz respectively.

The board comes with 6 channel audio supported using ALC655 Codec. The rear panel has connectors for 1 x PS/2 keyboard & PS/2 mouse connectors 4 x USB ports, 1 x RJ45 LAN connector, 1 x Parallel port (LPT1), 1 x Serial port (COM1), 1 x Audio ports (Line-in, Line-out, Mic-in). The 755-A2 comes with 1 x 20-pin ATX Power Supply Connector & 4-pin 12V Connector. This is especially important for stability for high powered CPUs.

Lets check out the gallery for more photos and BIOS features of this board.

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Specifications

Special Features
K8 HT 1600
DDR 400
RAID0, RAID1 support
Serial ATA
AGP 8X
6 Channel Audio
10/100 LAN

CPU

Socket 754 for AMD K8 Athlon 64 processor

High-performance Hyper Transport CPU interface.

Support transfer rate of 1600/1200/800/400 mega-transfers per second.

CHIPSET

SiS^® 755 & 964

North Bridge: SiS^® 755

South Bridge: SiS^® 964

MEMORY

2 x 184-pin DDR DIMM socket support up to 2 GB

Support DDR400/333/266/200 2.5V DDR SDRAM

EXPANSION SLOT

1 x AGP 8X/4X slot

5 x PCI slots

1 x CNR slot

STORAGE

Support by SiS^® 964

4 x Ultra DMA133/100/66 devices

2 x Serial ATA devices

RAID0 & RAID1 configuration

AUDIO

Realtek ALC655 6-Channel audio CODEC

Compliant with AC'97 2.3 specification

LAN

Realtek RTL8201BL 10/100 Mbps Fast Ethernet PHY

REAR PANEL I/O

1 x PS/2 keyboard & PS/2 mouse connectors

4 x USB ports

1 x RJ45 LAN connector

1 x Parallel port (LPT1)

1 x Serial port (COM1)

1 x Audio ports (Line-in, Line-out, Mic-in)

INTERNAL I/O CONNECTORS & HEADERS

1 x 20-pin ATX Power Supply Connector & 4-pin 12V Connector

1 x Floppy connector supports 360K~2.88M Bytes, 3 Mode FDDs or LS120

2 x IDE connectors

2 x Serial ATA connectors

1 x Speaker header

2 x USB 2.0 header support additional 4 USB Ports

1 x SPDIF out header

1 x Front panel switch/LED header

1 x Front panel audio header

CD in/ AUX in headers

CPUFAN/CASFAN connectors

SYSTEM BIOS

Award BIOS with 2Mb Flash ROM

Supports Plug and Play 1.0B, APM 1.2, Multi Boot, DMI

Full Support for ACPI revision 1.0 specification

FORM FACTOR

ATX Form Factor, 305*220mm

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