X-bit labs

ECS 755-A2 Socket754 Mainboard on SiS755 Chipset Review (page 2)

Category: Mainboards

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 02/21/2004 | 12:59 PM ]

Elitegroup decided to save on the accessories supplied with this low-end product. The package with the mainboard includes:

• A CD with necessary drivers;
• One FDD cable;
• One Parallel ATA/133 and one SerialATA-150 cable;
• I/O shield for the back panel of the system case.

Not much, you know. There are no USB brackets, and there are very few HDD cables, but that costs so little! We were also disappointed to find that the CPU retention mechanism (fastening bracket) is not included into the accessories and is not present on the mainboard. AMD includes these mechanisms with their boxed processors, but if you happen to have an OEM CPU version, you may get into trouble finding this bracket as such mechanisms don’t sell individually.

Closer Look

Once again, ECS 755-A2 mainboard is a “value” product and its characteristics are determined by SiS755 chipset only. There are no external onboard controllers, but the chipset is advanced enough for you not to really lack anything.

The mainboard supports all Socket 754 processors of the Athlon 64 family. There is also no doubt that it will have no problems with the upcoming Athlon 64 3700+ processor, too. There is one important moment, though: the CPU voltage regulator of the ECS 755-A2 is two-channel rather than three-channel as in many other Socket 754 mainboards. At the same time, Elitegroup didn’t save on the quality and quantity of the capacitors for the filter of the regulator, so their solution seems adequate enough. When testing and using this mainboard, we had no problems related to low-quality CPU powering.

ECS 755-A2 can take two DDR DIMM modules into its two slots. It supports DDR266/333/400 SDRAM as it becomes a regular mainboard for the Athlon 64. However, you can again see some economical measures here: most Athlon 64 mainboards from other manufacturers come with three memory slots. Anyway, I am not inclined to consider this a crucial drawback. The memory controller of the Athlon 64 supports four memory banks, so you can only fill all three DIMM slots with single-sided modules. Moreover, if the Athlon 64 system has three memory modules, it automatically loses the useful and interesting Cool’n’Quiet technology.

Cool’n’Quiet is supported by the reviewed mainboard. Moreover, ECS 755-A2 belongs to the small category of mainboards that allow disabling Cool’n’Quiet in the BIOS Setup. By the way, this technology works at FSB-overclocking, too, since it reduces the CPU clock-rate (when the processor is idle) by adjusting the CPU multiplier.

The North Bridge of SiS755 chipset is connected with the processor through the full-speed HyperTransport bus, 16-bit wide both ways and working at a frequency of 800MHz (DDR). This explains why ECS 755-A2 is faster than mainboards on nForce3 150 chipset, which has the HyperTransport bus working at a lower frequency and proving less bandwidth.

The available slots are: one AGP 8x (supports 0.8/1.5V graphics cards), five PCI, and one CNR, a rare slot nowadays, which is designed for a soft-modem, for example.