ECS PF88 Extreme

When building a PC, the motherboard will depend on whether you use Intel or AMD. Intel CPUs won't run on AMD motherboards and vice versa. That's all about to change with the ECS PF88 Extreme - an Intel-based motherboard that uses an AMD riser board, enabling it to run either CPU.

The board looks like an Intel Socket 775-based SLI board, but the give away is the long port separating the two graphics slots, which is where the A9S SIMA converter board sits.

The mainboard comes with four Dimm slots supporting up to 4GB of either dual-channel DDR2 533 or DDR2 667 memory. Two ATA/133 ports are available, which lets you make use of your old hard and optical drives. There are also four Sata and two Sata II ports, three PCI slots, Firewire,eight-channel audio and Gigabit Ethernet.

The A9S Sima converter card comes with an SIS756 PCI Express-compatible northbridge to control the two DDR400 Dimm slots. Space is limited between the memory slots and CPU socket, which makes it impossible to use the standard cooler supplied with larger 939 CPUs. This means you'll have to use either the older AMD cooler or a third-party cooler.

When tested with an AMD Athlon 64 4000+ it clocked up a Sysmark 2004 score of 207 and a 3DMark05 score of 6,159. With an Intel 660 processor it achieved 218 on Sysmark 2004 and 6,033 for 3DMark05.

See also:

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