ECS PF22 Extreme
| ECS PF22 Extreme Specification | |
|---|---|
| Board Feature | Implementation |
| Northbridge | Intel i955X |
| Southbridge | Intel ICH7R |
| Processor Support | All Intel LGA775 microprocessors including Extreme Edition dual-core Pentium D HyperThreading Technology |
| Memory Support | DDR2 DDR2-667 Maximum 8GiB total, 4 slots |
| Graphics Support | PCI Express 2 PEG16X slots ATI Crossfire |
| PCI Express | 1 x PCIe 1X slot |
| PCI Conventional | 3 x PCI 2.3 slots |
| Networking | Intel PC82573V on PCIe; Gigabit Ethernet Realtek RTL8110S on PCI; Gigabit Ethernet |
| Firewire | VIA VT6307 on PCI; 1 FW400 backplane port, 1 FW400 pin header |
| Audio | Realtek ALC880; HD Audio, 8-channel |
| Disks | Intel ICH7R; 4 SATAII, 1 ATA133 IDE, Intel Matrix Storage Silicon Image Sil3132 on PCIe; 2 x SATA300 NCQ, RAID0,1 |
As far as i955X boards go, there's not much the PF22 does wrong. If there's one thing I'd change, it'd be the provision of the second networking controller on the PCI Express bus, given there's 5 1X chunks of bandwidth sat doing nothing, coming from the ICH7R. ECS only plumb in one slot to the ICH7R, and one PCIe-based ASIC, so there's four lanes of bandwidth left. Having the Realtek 8110S as the second Ethernet controller is a bit daft.
Otherwise there's a mass of SATA2 (6 ports in total, 4 from the ICH7R and Matrix Storage) for disk connectivity, with a single ATA133 port letting you know that SATA is the only real way to connect mass storage to the board, that lone ATA port realistically only usable for optical hardware.
Crossfire support comes from the two PEG16X slots. Each slot can get a maximum of 8 PCI Express lanes, splitting the 16 available from the i955X northbridge. DDR2 memory is all you can connect to i955X, the four 240-pin slots on the mainboard giving you 8GiB max, ECC support, and up to 667MHz in officially supported speeds.
i955X also means dual-channel memory, up to 266MHz bus processors (including dual-core chips and all Extreme Editions), HyperThreading, and support for 64-bit EM64T processors. It's the top of the Intel tree until the silicon monstrosity releases i975, Conroe and a huge bag of related goodies due sometime soon.
In short, if Intel is your thing, there's not much missing on this i955X board bar support for future processors that are on the way. Let's look at the board that implements them.
