Author: Scott Piercy

Editor: Nigel Woodford 

Model: ECS PX1 Extreme

This has been one of those situations we as editors and reviewers try to avoid. Actually working in this business is truly a careful balancing act, requiring us to be fair and balanced to everyone involved. Manufacturers naturally want their products shown in the best light, and that's understandable. Furthermore, end users have a right to be informed, and indeed without them we *and* the manufacturers would be out of a job. Since we are an enthusiast publication, we try to review products that appeal to this segment. Along these lines, quite naturally, manufacturers who create products for this segment of buyers try to cater to their needs, with varying degrees of success.

From our first "preview" last month, it's quite clear that ECS is attempting to target the enthusiast with the PX1 Extreme. We invite you to read our preview here, but it's obvious from its packaging and overall feature set that it's not intended to be a plain vanilla board. It's chocked full of features and expandability options, and one of the very few Intel P965 chipset boards that supports ATI Crossfire. As we are using this board as part of an upcoming Crossfire evaluation of the P965 chipset, we can at least let a little bit slip and say the board supports Crossfire seamlessly and with no apparent bandwidth issues from the P965's x16/x4 channel arrangement. It's also one of the few Intel VIIV compliant boards available, thanks to the ICH8DH Southbridge. Due to the complexities of VIIV licensing compliance with Intel, it's a bit odd to see the ICH8DH Southbridge on a retail channel enthusiast board, but certainly quite welcome from the standpoint of the budding home theatre buff who wants to build his own Media Center Edition HTPC.

The layout of the board itself is for the most part drama free, except for one issue that ECS brought to our attention. We'll discuss that a bit later, but from a component layout standpoint we were well pleased, and made evident that a lot of thought and care went into a logical arrangement of the boards connectors and components.