ECS NF650iSLIT-A Motherboard

(4.5 star rating) Written by: William Ford

Click here for the Newegg.com lowest price on the ECS NF650iSLIT-A (V1.0) ATX Intel Motherboard

With their recent release of their flagship nVIDIA 680i based motherboard, ECS has now launched a slightly scaled-down motherboard version in the form of the ECS NF650iSLIT-A. Based on the new nVIDIA 650i chipset, the ECS NF650iSLIT-A sports many of the same overclocker friendly features that makes 680i boards so popular --- but at a more friendly price. This is a motherboard geared towards gamers, and specifically toward gamers who want the best performance for their dollar in mind. It supports the newest Core 2 Duo processors (including the Core 2 Extreme and the Core 2 Quad) and supports SLI-equipped graphics cards for state-of-the-art video performance, as well as support for what is currently the fastest FSB speed available at 1333MHz (overclocked). With an impressive array of features and a lower price than 680i based motherboards, let's take a close look at the ECS NF650iSLTT-A to see how it stacks up.

Design

The motherboard supports two PCI-Express 16X video cards and using SLI technology, they can be connected with the supplied SLI card bridge to essentially double the graphic processing of the system. However, this does come at the cost of splitting the bandwidth of the PCI-Express slots in half. Each PCI-Express 16X slot is reduced to 8X on this board whether you are using SLI technology or not.

Worries about the effect of this on a single card were quickly abandoned when I installed an ASUS EAX1950PRO in a single slot and found that I was getting the same effective frame rates in CounterStrike: Source on the ECS NF650iSLIT-A as I did on an ASUS P5AD2-E Premium Motherboard with a single PCI-Express 16X slot running at full bandwidth. It appears that the bandwidth has less to do with the graphics performance than you would think. This motherboard does not support ATI's crossfire technology and all of my graphics cards are ATI Radeon cards so I have not tested the boards SLI function, however from the performance of a single Radeon X1950Pro I can safely say that the graphics capabilities of this board are on par with current gaming demands and the 8X PCI-Express bandwidth is not really a factor for single graphics cards.

The board has 3 PCI slots for expansion and two PCI-Express 1X slots. The PCI-Express 1X slots are disabled if PCI-Express 16X slot 2 is used. So if you are using SLI, you will not be able to use the PCI-Express 1X slots at all. This is another reason to consider a single powerful graphics card if you need the 1X slots for other peripheral cards. The board is an overclocker's dream with an aluminum heatsink and fan on the Northbridge, a heatsink on the Southbridge, BIOS supporting up to 1333MHz FSB and totally adjustable voltages and processing parameters accessible in the AWARD BIOS Firmware. The Firmware revision is 1.0 so there may be updates as technology proceeds.

Features

• Processor support: LGA775 Core 2 Extreme, Core 2 Quad, Core 2 Duo, Pentium D, Pentium 4, Celeron D
• FSB (Front side bus) speeds: 533/800/1066 (overclock supported 1333) MHz
• Chipsets: C55 Northbridge (heat dispersed by fan cooled heatsink); MCP51 Southbridge (heat dispersed by heatsink)
• Supported Memory: DDR2 400/533/667/800 MHz
• Dual Channel Memory Bus: Yes
• Memory Slots: 4
• Maximum Memory: 8GB per slot up to 32GB total RAM
• LAN: Integrated NVIDIA NForce Network Controller 10/100/1000
• Audio: Onboard Realtek 7.1 High Definition audio controller
• 1394 FireWire (optional): Disabled on this board
• Parallel Port (optional): Omitted on this board
• I/O Ports: 2 - PS/2; 1 - Serial; 4 -USB; 1 - RJ-45 LAN; 2 - SPDIF out; 1 - microphone; 1 - audio line-in; 8 channel audio line-out
• Drive Controllers: 2 - NVIDIA nForce 430/410 Serial ATA RAID controller; 2 - Standard ATA 133
• Max drives: 4 - SATA; 4 - ATA33/66/100/133 (8 total)
• RAID support: 0; 1; 0+1; 5
• BIOS/Firmware: AWARD

Retail box	Top view of the motherboard	Box contents

Setup and Installation

I installed a Pentium D 945 3.4GHz dual core processor on the board with 2GB (2x1GB) of OCZ DDR2 800MHz RAM. The installation of the processor and RAM are easy enough; you simply place the processor in the slot (since it can fit in only the correct orientation) and close the socket. The memory also fits only in the correct orientation. I also installed a Thermaltake TMG i2 cooler on the processor.

The power supply used is an Ultra 550W SLI-Ready with a 120mm cooling fan built-in. The power supply you use should have dual 6-pin PCI-Express power leads if you plan on using SLI technology. You will also be required to plug an additional Molex power lead into the motherboard in order to use SLI. Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit edition was installed as the operating system. I decided to use this operating system because it takes advantage of the 64-bit processing capabilities of the system. I use Cakewalk Sonar 6 Producer Edition on the system for studio multi-track recording and mixing and it also takes advantage of the 64-bit environment for superior performance in studio recording. This was probably the biggest factor in my decision to use Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit.

When installing the drivers for the motherboard, I came across a slight problem that was quickly rectified. The launcher for the driver CD does not support Windows Vista 64-bit; however, I soon realized that Windows Vista had already installed the necessary drivers for the motherboard and all of the onboard peripherals.