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ECS 915P-A Motherboard Review :: The Board
The 915P-A comes in a standard ATX form factor measuring 305x240mm. If you have a regular ATX case whether medium or full this board should fit easily. The 12V power connector is in a less than optimum position on the motherboard, positioned under the CPU Socket. The optimum position lies closer to the top of the board under the parallel port. The 5V ATX connector is a 24 pin power connector with 4 of the pins blocked off by default. To insert a 24-pin 5V ATX connector, simply remove the film covering the connector.  12V power connector  5V Power connector The 915P-A supports most of the current 800MHz FSB LGA-775 CPUs including the Pentium 4 3.8GHz Prescott that was recently released and the 3.4 Pentium 4 Extreme Edition. Unfortunately, this motherboard doesn't support the 1066MHz FSB 3.46 Extreme Editions, but as that is more of a high-end CPU costing over $1000, it probably would be best to buy a motherboard based upon the 925XE chipset instead.  Capacitors  CPU Socket Memory support on this motherboard is for both DDR and DDR2. There are 4 DIMMs (Dual In-line Memory Module) on the board with 2 for DDR and 2 for DDR2 memory. Unfortunately you can't mix both DDR memory and DDR2 at the same time on the board. A DDR2 slot has 240 pins instead of the 184 pins on a DDR slot. The DDR slots are slightly longer than the DDR2 slots. Looking at memory prices on Pricewatch, DDR2 memory is much more expensive than DDR at the same speed without providing any extra memory bandwidth at the same speed.  Memory The North Bridge is cooled passively by a heat sink. The South Bridge chip is Intel's new ICH6R chip. This replaced the ICH5 from the 875 and 865 motherboards. Visually the board is a black color with 1 PCI Express X16 slot, 2 PCI Express X1 slots, an AGP Express slot, and 2 regular PCI slots making the expansion slot options for the board. The AGP Express slot is deserving of special mention. This is a PCI Express slot that emulates an AGP slot. ECS has a list of supported video cards on their manual including the major ATI NVIDIA and XGI video cards from about 1 or more years ago.  North Bridge  Expansion slots  PCI Express x16  AGP Express  PCI and AGP Drive support on the ECS 915P-A consists of 4 SATA connectors, 1 PATA connector and one floppy connector. This is fairly pedestrian in the motherboard market today. The location of the PATA connector is fine, but the location of the floppy drive connector is on the far side of the board, which is ok, but I probably would have preferred it closer to the PATA connector. One nice touch about the board is a tab on the jumper to clear the CMOS.  Floppy drive connector  Drive connectors  SATA connectors The input/output block on the rear of the motherboard is fairly common arrangement. The rear I/O consists of a PS/2 Mouse port, a PS/2 Keyboard port, a parallel port, 4 USB 2.0 ports, a RJ45 jack for the Gigabit Ethernet, and 6 jacks for the onboard sound of the motherboard. The onboard sound on the 915P-A is Azalea based, with support for 7.1 surround sound built in. This is the replacement for AC'97 and is sufficient for every user today. There are two headers on the board for 4 more USB ports, but they are not included with the motherboard bundle. The ICH6R supports Gigabit LAN natively. Discuss This Article
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