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Review: ECS ELITEGROUP PF22 Deluxe - First Look

by Ryszard Sommefeldt on 4 December 2005, 12:05

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qad54

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Board Layout

Board

Board

Looks great, doesn't it? Heh. ECS's horrible colour scheme seems destined to continue for a while, the PF22 Extreme sporting the fairly disgusting (to my eyes anyway, you might absolutely love it) purple, burple, orange, green, yellow, white and blue colour combo of boards gone by.

But while it might look like a Liberace suit, the layout doesn't put many feet wrong. ECS stay logical with component placement, keeping the CPU socket area free of obstruction, the three-phase power circuit required for clean CPU-bound power to the left of the CPU socket itself, right in line with the exhaust fan that cools that bit of the board.

Memory modules are close enough to the right side of the board to not cause heatsink issues with the CPU (for most sinks anyway), ECS sticking the 24-pin EPS power connector nearby on the right hand edge of the board. It's one of the only decent places for that bit of plastic and pins, so thumbs up to ECS's layout engineers there. The i955X northbridge is topped with mad bling, the polished metal heatsink and fairly crappy 40mm fan keeping the bridge within operating temperatures. That fan's noise, combined with that of the power circuitry cooler's, adds up to a crappy noise profile in the face of completely passive products from other vendors.

The board, instead of asking for just P4, also requires P4+ auxiliary power. Combined, you'll find both, especially if one moulded plug contains all eight pins, called SSI. There's also a 4-pin HDD-style connector for extra PCI Express slot juice, likely for stability in Crossfire mode, feeding hungry ATI graphics boards.

ECS take no shortcuts with power, it seems. A small passive cooler keeps the southbridge chilly, just to the right of the PCI Express slots. There's two 16X ones as stated and, under the sticker in the photograph, another 1X slot in between. Like every other board vendor on the planet, ECS place peripheral ASICs in the slot gaps and around that area, for space and trace routing reasons. They shove the Firewire controller in the PEG slot gap, with networking chips on the left edge of the board.

Tiny ALC880, Three PCI Conventional slots, sextuplet of SATA ports (red for Sil3132), branding panel, floppy and sole IDE port all sit in a row, rounding off what's south of the northbridge. Everything else, like pin and fan headers, are where you'd expect them.

Summary

It's clean, there's two-slot gap between PEG slots for dual-slot graphics, and bar the SSI and Molex connectors in a fairly awkward location near the northbridge there's nothing to complain about too much. As always, I'd push SATA connectors to the very right edge, put all power connectors on the top edge if possible and angle all ATA connectors north-south, but it's not that bad.

Infact, the thing that makes me laugh the most is the misspelling of Extreme in a couple of places on the silkscreened stuff. A hearty 'LOL' for that, methinks.

Lastly, ECS, if you're reading, where are the all-black mainboards we talked about in China?! 做一个完全地黑主板!