ECS P4M 800 PRO-M Motherboard

The P4M 800 PRO-M (microATX form factor) motherboard from

ECS has a LGA 775 socket supporting the dual core CPU in both the Celeron and

Pentium families. The board's Northbridge is a P4M800PRO and the Southbridge

is the VT8237 chip, both from VIA. The P4M800 Pro has an FSB of 1066 MHz and

supports both DDR and DDR2 dual-channel RAM. While the board features separate

DIMM slots for both types of RAM, you can use either DDR or DDR2 at a time, so

you are restricted to a maximum of 2 GB of DDR or 2 GB of DDR2 memory. The P4M

has on-board graphics, but also has an AGP 8x slot for an external graphics

card. With PCI-E rapidly replacing AGP, we find the 8x AGP slot somewhat

outdated.

Additionally, the board has 3 PCI slots, 2 slots for SATA1

and two slots for IDE drives. There are four ports for USB 2.0 for the rear

panel, two USB headers for the front panel and a 10/100 Mbps Ethernet port for

connectivity.

We tested the board with our standard benchmarks of BW and

MCCW for business productivity and content creation. For graphics testing, we

ran 3DMark 2003 and UT 2004. We used a P4 HT 3.4 GHz CPU, 1 GB DDR2 RAM, 80 GB

7,200 rpm SATA HDD with Windows XP SP2. It scored  32.4 for BW and 49.5 for MCCW. The onboard display does not

support Pixel Shader 2.0, so we had to run 3DMark 03. Even in this old

benchmark, the board was able to run only one out of the four tests and it

scored just 168. With UT 2004 we got a score of 36.807 with an average FPS of

36.741 at a resolution of 1024x768. Both graphics scores are well below the

mark.

Bottom Line: Buy this

board only if you're on a tight budget, and have an old AGP card lying around.

Abe Kurian