ECS

The PF4 Extreme is the top model within ECS' P4 motherboard line.

Apart from a new line of 915 series motherboards for the Intel Socket T, PCI Express and DDR2 memory, ECS was very proud to present us a product that really looks promising. The problem with Intel's new chipset family is that the user's choices are limited to either Intel's integrated graphics or getting a PCI Express graphics card.

VIA is still working on its PT890 chipset that will incorporate both AGP and PCI Express in order to address both early adopters and cost-conscious buyers, but it still has some bugs to fix. Intel did not provide its 915 and 925X MCH chips with any AGP interface, so ECS decided to do something original. While many people were thinking about integrating a PCI-to-AGP bridge onto motherboards (such as the one NVIDIA is using for their GeForce PCX product line), ECS put together a kind of AGP slot using two PCI bus master slots, called AGP eXpress. The company says its benchmark numbers range between close to those of PCI Express and up to 25% slower. We were already promised one of these boards soon, so we hope to be ready with a performance evaluation shortly after Intel's official Socket T and 9xx chipset series release.

ECS' secret weapon: A 915P motherboard featuring both PCI Express and AGP. The latter is attached to the Southbridge and consumes two PCI bus master slots. As the interface between Northbridge and Southbridge will support 1 GB/s, there should be no bottleneck here.