ECS PF88 Extreme 4 Dual Platform Motherboard Preview :: The Board

The PF88 Extreme has two chipsets on the board at the same time, the SIS 756 and SIS 656. The SIS 656 is designed for the Intel Pentium 4 platform, with support for most of the LGA-775 CPUs present on the board. The SIS 756 chipset is designed for the AMD Athlon 64 Socket 939 platform.. Memory support is provided by 4 240-pin DIMM slots, providing support for up to 4GB of dual-channel DDR2 memory of up to 667MHz speed. The motherboard has a SIS 965 South Bridge supporting both the 756 and 656 chipsets.

LGA-775

DDR2

South Bridge

North Bridge

Expansion options on this board are interesting. First thing to notice on the board is the presence of 2 PCI Express X16 slots. Unlike NVIDIA's SLI solution this does not provide support for 2 video cards to improve performance. Rather the 2nd slot is required when using the SIMA add-in card. I'll describe the SIMA card a little later in the review. The other special slot on the board is for the SIMA card. One thing this board has that irks me a little is the single PCI Express X1 slot available. There are two PCI Express X1 slots, one above the PCI Express X16 graphics slot (when the SIMA card is installed, and one in between the SIMA and 2nd PCI Express slot. Most motherboards come with two or more PCI Express X1 slots as their complement.

Storage support on the PF88 Extreme comes in the form of 6 SATA ports. The SIS 656 platform supports up to 4 SATA ports natively. ECS added a Silicon Image 3132 chip which is Silicon Image's replacement for the Sil3114 chip. This new chip adds support for SATA2 to the motherboard. At the moment, only NVIDIA's nForce4 platform provides support for the SATA2 hard disk drives natively. As we move further into 2005, I'd expect new chipsets to support SATA2.

SATA

Silicon Image

On-board audio is provided by Realtek's ALC850 CODEC. The ALC850 supports up to 7.1 surround sound on the chipset. The PF88 Extreme comes with 6 audio jacks, Line-In, 4X Line-Out and Mic-In jacks. The ALC850 is ok for a chipset, but I prefer chipsets that support Intel's HDA (High Definition Audio) standard like the ALC880. The other rear panel ports include a PS/2 Mouse and Keyboard ports, a Parallel port, 2 COM ports, a RJ45 jack for the LAN, and a 1394 (Firewire) port.

Realtek

20-pin ATX

4-pin Power

The layout of the PF88 board is pretty good in most respects. The CPU area is clear and you can use virtually any Intel based cooler. The slot layout is similar in many respects to a 925 board, with the exception of 3 PCI slots (1 PCI Extreme 2 PCI 2.3), 2 PCI Express X16 slots (one of which can be in use at any given time), and the SIMA slot. ECS decided to outfit the North Bridge with a heat sink. There are also two BIOS chips on the board.