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| Final Verdict: ECS PX1 Extreme |
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| Friday, 22 December 2006 | |
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Page 2 of 4 PX1 Extreme BIOS The initial shipping BIOS these boards came with was rather meager from an enthusiast's standpoint, offering very little in the way of voltage adjustments, DRAM timing adjustments, Front Side Bus adjustments, or Memory bus multipliers. We'd pointed this out repeatedly and clearly to ECS's marketing representative in the U.S. and to their own engineers in Taiwan, and we continued to get very conflicting feedback as to whether or not these issues would be addressed. In our experience even the most basic of enthusiast sector P965 chipset main boards have been quite feature rich from a BIOS standpoint, so we held our breath, crossed our fingers and toes, and hoped. Let's walk through the BIOS screens here, and seeing whether or not they've made any headway should become readily apparent. This is the quite familiar Phoenix/Award BIOS screen we all know and love, so anyone with half a clue can navigate through things here. The Advanced BIOS Options screen should also be readily familiar. The board, like most boards with SATA controllers, allows you to specify boot priority on multiple drives, and you can even specify network book methods as well. The onboard J Micron controller is also included in the boot priority capabilities here, so you can boot from basically any of the connected SATA or IDE devices you choose. Advanced Chipset features is pretty basic, allowing the usual basic DRAM timing adjustments, setting of DRAM bus frequency, and very little else.      
The PC
Health Status screen is again pretty much what you expect to see.
Likewise for the PNP/PCI screen, there's just nothing to see here
out of the ordinary, and that's a good thing.
     Before we go ahead to the benchmarking, we'll talk about one more issue with the board, one actually brought to our attention by ECS themselves. In our initial testing of the board, we used one of our favorite heat pipes for S775 boards, the Arctic Freezer 7 Pro. While we've been continually impressed with the Freezer 7's efficiency, we didn't realize just how much thinner this heat pipe is than Intel's own stock heat sink and other low profile heat sinks. As you can see in the photographs provided to us by ECS, there are significant clearance issues with the passive VRM cooling solution and the low profile solid state capacitors around the socket. It's not an issue at all with Intel's stock unit, or with the Freezer 7, but it's an issue you should be made aware of should you consider purchasing this main board.    |