ECS PF88 review

Verdict:

Review Date: 24 Oct 2005

Price when reviewed: inc VAT; A4S riser £33 inc VAT

Reviewed By: David Ludlow

Our Rating 3 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

ECS's PF88 is probably the strangest motherboard we've ever reviewed, as you can convert it from supporting Intel to AMD processors by installing an optional riser card (different boards are available for Socket 754 and Socket 939) in one easy step.

At least that's the theory.

In practice, changing from Intel to AMD is quite tricky. You have to remove 24 individual jumpers. The riser card blocks the first PCI-E x16, so you then have to move your graphics card to the second slot, which is inactive in the motherboard's native Intel mode. Next you have to remove the existing BIOS and install the one that comes with the riser card. This card also has its own DDR memory slots as AMD processors access memory in a different way to Intel's. If you've already used the motherboard in Intel mode, you can't reuse the memory, as the Intel part of the board uses DDR2 memory.

We tested the motherboard in both configurations, starting with a 3.6GHz Pentium 4 processor. Its Shopper application benchmark score of 119 is slightly below that of other motherboards because the SiS 656 chipset is slower than Intel's 945 or nVidia's nForce 4. With the the A4S Socket 754 riser card and Sempron 3400+ installed, it scored 111 in our application benchmarks, which is slower than the score this processor clocked up the last time we used it.

Performance from both AMD and Intel processors wasn't as good as we had hoped. While the motherboard is quite cheap, buying the riser card makes it an expensive choice for AMD processors. Ultimately, you are better off choosing the type of processor you want and buying a dedicated motherboard for it.

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