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ECS P43T-A2 Motherboard Conclusion
Submitted by jwhitakr on Tue, 10/28/2008 - 16:24.
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Click here for the Newegg.com lowest price on the ECS P43T-A2 ATX Intel Motherboard! |
BIOS
The motherboard uses AMI BIOS (American Megatrends Inc.) and supports many options including overclocking the processor and PCI bus by 1 MHz increments. You can also set the voltage by increments of 0.01. You can choose the memory bus speed at either 667MHz or 800MHz or have the board auto-detect.
You can have up to six SATA drives installed and choose the boot order in the advanced setup section of the BIOS. This means you can install multiple operating systems on separate drives and easily switch between them by launching the BIOS on boot and setting the drive with the desired operating system as 1st drive. Just keep in mind that some operating systems play nicely with others (ehem… Linux) and some not so much (cough…windows …cough). Even so, with each operating system on its own drive, there shouldn’t be too much problem with multiple operating systems.
In the BIOS you can also check the system health, which means you can check the fan speeds and temperature of the processor. You can set an alarm to sound when the temperature rises above your designated degree and have the computer shut down if it rises higher to the next designated degree. This comes in handy when your processor fan dies unexpectedly because the temperature can rise extremely high in a matter of seconds and if the computer doesn’t shut down, you’ll be buying a new processor (and possibly a motherboard).
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| Side View | Back Panel / IO Ports | Final Build |
Test Setup
- Operating System: Vista Home Premium x64
- Motherboard: ECS P43T-A2
- CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 @ 3.0GHz
- Memory: 4GB G-Skill DDR2 6400
- CPU Heatsink: Noctua NH-U12P
- Video card: EVGA GeForce 8800 GT
- Hard drive: Hitachi 500GB SATA
Application and Gaming Performance
The machine performs admirably for all media whether it be MP3 music, AVI video, HD Video or streaming from the web. Media Center has no problem finding and playing all media on the system. So, I can say that this is a fantastic media PC. I installed an ASUS 20X DLDVD-RW and the computer plays back DVD without any lag or glitching. It also burns DVD and CD without any errors so far. Burning software tested with was Windows Media Player, Nero Express, Power 2 Go and Adobe Encore. All of the burning programs were able to handle the high speed data burns.
Playing games on the system is highly impressive considering there is no SLI or Crossfire support with the Intel chipset. The motherboard handles the GeForce 8800GT in a single card installation and plays almost as well as another SLI configured PC with the two of the same cards. Games tested were Doom3, Battlefield 2, Half-Life 2, Halo 2 and FlatOut Ultimate Carnage. All the games played with acceptable frame rate (never below 30fps with average 60fps) with no Anti-aliasing and display set to 1280x1024 32-bit resolution.
Just to clarify, on a different system using dual GeForce 8800GT cards in SLI configuration only boosted the performance marginally over the P43T-A2 with the same memory and drive; a far cry from the 2.0X performance that NVIDIA Claims.
OpenOffice.org is the software I installed for productivity. Let just say that if you are only interested in the motherboards productivity capability, there is nothing to worry about. Even with the slowest processor available installed and only 256MB memory, this board will smoke any office application including Microsoft’s Access and PowerPoint.
3DMark06 Benchmarks
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Throughout the testing the P43T-A2 was solid and reliable, with no system crashes or system hangs. A reliable motherboard is a must for every PC, and this offering from ECS does not disappoint in this respect.
ECS P43T-A2 Motherboard
Overall, this is a solid well rounded motherboard for any home or office computer system. It isn’t designed for the extreme gamer, the audiophile or professional video studios but it is designed for anyone who just wants a good solid foundation for a well rounded home or office computer. It is very stable, works great with Windows Vista x64 and will make a great start to a new PC or for upgrading an older one.
Pros: Very stable, supports Windows Vista x64, 16GB RAM support, easily overclocked.
Cons: No legacy support (no floppy controller nor parallel port), No SLI or Crossfire support on the Intel chipset.
Rating: 4.0 out of 5
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