ECS RC410L/800-M Motherboard

The ECS RC410L/800-M V 2.0 is a micro ATX motherboard with

the RC410L (NorthBridge) and SB450 (SouthBridge) chipset for Intel processors.

It's meant for home and business users, and features an LGA 775 socket that

can take a P4, Celeron D or Pentium D processor. It has 2 DIMMs for DDR2 SDRAM

667 MHz that can take upto 2 GB of RAM with 800 MHz FSB. Other slots available

are four SATA I, one PCI-E x16 for graphics, two IDE slots and three PCI slots.

It has onboard sound and a header for the S/PDIF connector. For connectivity, it

has four USB 2.0 ports and one 10/100 Mbps Ethernet port onboard.

We used a P4 3.4 GHz HT processor with 1 GB DDR2 RAM and an

80 GB 7,200 rpm SATA drive with Win XP PRO SP2 for testing this board. The

benchmarks used were BW and MCCW. The RC410L scored 32.0 with Business Winstone,

which makes it one of the better entry-level boards. We got a score of 50.9 with

MCCW which is lower than the 59.4 for Biostar Tforce 6100-939's. The 3DMark

'05, UT 2004 and DOOM3 benchmarks were used for graphics evaluation. The board

gave a good performance with these benchmarks as well, when using the onboard

graphics. The score was 598 with 3DMark, while with UT 2004 it was 49 fps.

Compared to the similarly configured Biostar's 661 3DMarks and 48.07 fps,

these are slightly better scores-the Biostar had nVidia nForce4 powered

graphics.

Bottom Line: Compared

to the similarly priced Biostar T6100-939 reviewed last month, this one lacks

the overclocking capabilities and performance. However, looking at the price

it's a good buy, giving dual-core CPU support at a little under 4k.

Abe Kurian