ECS PF88 has caught the attention of many in the industry. Being a 1st tier company that focuses on mainboards that provides cost/performance, it is indeed a bold move of them to come implement such a design on this PF88. In fact, putting aside the upgradeability, we can see that ECS has made a good board with features like GbE supported by 965 South Bridge, Firewire, SATA RAID, DDR2-667 support, PCI-E based SiliconImage 3132 SATAII + NCQ enabled SATA controller. On top of that, they packaged in a wireless adaptor for you to logon to your home 802.11b/g network. This seems to be one of the best features board out there from ECS. Most importantly, with a BIOS update, the board supports the Dual core LGA775 processors.

The SIMA A9S is the upgrade board that supports the Socket 939 processor with 2 slots of DDR400 supported. With our Corsair TwinX CAS 2, 5-2-2, we ran the board with no issues at all using the FX-53. The interesting fact is that ECS is also preparing new upgrade slots for Socket 479, Socket M2 etc.

Although the board is featured packed, ECS PF88 seems to suffer from a setback from its memory performance. With longer trace lines, patched MULTIOL, we are not surprised by the results. Although it appears generally weaker in the P4 benchmarks, the K8 benchmarks seems better. In fact, in some categories, it even outperform the SiS 756 reference board we tested before. With newer BIOS, I think the performance difference between the PF88 and the 925XE will be narrowed.

Installation is easy for the PF88. With 2 PCI-E x 16 slots which is not meant for SLI, you can easily guess which slot to plug your graphics card if you use the Elite BUS with A9S. The only trouble we had is the transition from P4 to K8. Blue screen appears after Windows XP is loaded. Loading in SAFE mode is OK but we tried in vain, there seems no easy way to migrate to K8 without doing a fresh installation of Win XP.

We noticed the heat coming from the chipsets. To stabilise the system, we put heatsink on the South Bridge and also replaced the thermal tape of the north bridges with thermal paste. It seemed to help a lot. Another unusual thing is that the North bridge SiS 656 seems to be "powered on" even when we are using the A9S North Bridge SiS 756.