The new motherboard from ECS, the G43T-M comes with an LGA-775 socket,
designed to run both Core 2 Duo or a Core 2 Quad processor. The northbridge is
the Eaglelake G43 and the Intel ICH10 is at the southbridge. With support for
front side bus speeds of up to 1333Mhz, the motherboard also has dual channel
DDR2 support (4 slots). The standard set of features on this motherboard include
six serial ATA 2 ports, IDE channel support, PCI express x 16 and Gigabit
Ethernet. Apart from these, it also has support for 8 channel HD audio and an
HDMI port which is a plus at its price.
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We tested the motherboard using an Intel Core 2 Quad processor running with
2.66GHz coupled with 1 GB RAM and 320GB HDD at 7200rpm and Windows XP SP3.
Because it's an entry level motherboard, we were expecting a just decent
performance. The PC Mark score on this motherboard was a decent 4761 and so was
the case with POV ray at 46951. It performed poorly while running the 3D Mark
benchmark which tests graphics capability with a score of just 542 3D marks. We
used the SiSoftware Sandra to check for memory latency and it scored 108ns. The
last benchmark used on this one was the Cinebench R10. The score while rendering
one CPU was 2178 which is decent for an entry level motherboard.
Bottom Line: ECS motherboard is a good buy at
this price as it has a decent performance and a good set of features.