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ECS RD480-A939 Motherboard

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PCQ Bureau
New Update

This ECS motherboard is for budget conscious gamers. The

board supports AMD Athlon 64/FX/X2 processors and has 1GHz FSB. It is an ATi

Cross Fire board, which means that you can put two parallel PCIe graphic cards

of Cross Fire edition. The Cross Fire technology is currently supported by the

Windows XP SP2 and XP Pro 64 bit OS only, therefore, make sure that your graphic

card drivers support the ATi Cross Fire technology. The motherboard has two

slots each of PCIe x16, PCI and PCIe x1. It also has 8 USB and 4 SATA ports and

supports RAID. It supports 6-channel audio for the music enthusiasts.

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Price: Rs 5,000 (2 yrs

warranty)
Key Specs: ATi Cross

Fire Support
Contact: Cyberstar



India




, Bangalore



Tel: 51266808



Email: ripunjay@cyberstarindia.com



RQS# E33 or SMS 130333 to 9811800601


We tested the motherboard with the nVidia 7800GT and 7800

graphics cards. Though we were able to install the OS with these cards, the

machine couldn't boot up after installation. Then we tried the ATi graphics

card X1300, and strangely, it worked perfectly. Does this mean that ATi is

making its board incompatible with nVidia cards? We didn't find it documented

anywhere, and surely hope that ATi is not getting into such a practice. We

tested the motherboard with a single ATi Radeon X1300 graphics card, AMD Athlon

64 FX -55 processor with 1GB DDR 400 RAM and 120GB SATA HDD. The benchmarks used

were SYSmark04 SE for Office and

Internet applications, 3Dmark 05 for graphics and DOOM 3

for gaming. In SYSmark, the board's performance was great at 214 compared to

the 194 score of MSI RD480 motherboard (also reviewed in this issue). 3Dmark

gave a score of 2878 which was higher than the MSI RD480 score. The DOOM 3 mark

score was also higher than the MSI board at 38.2 fps at 1024x786



resolution.

Bottom Line: Compared to MSI RD480 motherboard this

is obviously the better choice for ATi connoiseurs, both performance and

price-wise.

Anubhav Verma

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