ECS P4M800PRO-M V2.0 (VIA P4M800 Pro chipset) for Core 2 Duo / Extreme Benchmarks 10/10
Bluetooth 24 Nov 2006

Pricing of P4M800pro >>>

Conclusion

ECS surprised me with this board. As we have already seen, the ECS P4M800Pro-M v2.0 is a board that utilitises the older VIA P4 chipset that supports single memory channel. After running through the benchmarks, we can see that the performance is a bit behind the high end boards that are more costly. Not only that, most of the high end boards require you to use a PCIe and the more expensive DDR2 memory which we have proven that it didn't really matter so long you can set your DDR module to run at super aggressive timings.

Due to the chipset, the performance of the internal graphics is more suitable for office use and we do not recomemnd that for playing games. For the light gamers, a AGP card like the 7600GS we used suit be good enough for your usage.

The board uses the VIA 8237R+ South bridge which is definitely a more welcomed than the 965P. This is because it supports the older generation of HDD, equipped with 2 channels of IDE. Some of the 965p boards don't even have a IDE connector. There are 2 SATA I ports which you can run your SATA HDD in RAID 0 or 1.

I was surprised when i saw voltage options in the BIOS. Although the board has voltage options available for Vcore, Vdimm etc, the multiplier is locked for our ES CPU. The FSB range is also limited to up to 300MHz. Without much changes to the voltage levels, we ran the board at 3.30GHz (11x300) by increasing the FSB. This is a plus for those who prefers to run a moderate o/c for stable use.

Overall, this board is definitely aim for the budget user who just needs the basics of computing. In fact, it is already has more than enough for the normal user out there. I would recommend this board as a entry level PC with a cheaper 820D or low end E6300 Core 2 Duo with aggressive DDR timings and AGP card.
 

Pricing 46 USD.  A bargin buy unless you want to fork out 350 USD for a NV680i.

Discuss

Pros

• Core 2 Duo and Extreme support
• DDR and DDR2 support
• Legacy support for AGP 8x
• RAID 0,1
• Dual Channel IDE
• Overclocking options

Cons

• No GbE
• No eSATA
• FSB limitation to 300MHz
• 6 ch audio
• No 1394
• No SATA II

Ratings

Here are my ratings out of 10 stars.

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