ECS Motherboard ECS 945G-M3 V3.0 Core 2 Duo MATX
Motherboard
ECS (Elitegroup
Computer Systems) has been manufacturing motherboards and peripherals for
some time. Although based in Taiwan, their products are manufactured in China.
ECS originally was one of the Premier Gaming PC manufactures but fell on hard
times when the gaming boxes went big (XBOX, PS2, etc). I have not owned an ECS
product so this is a barebones review. Their motherboards are state of the art,
with all the latest innovations you would find on any top of the line
motherboards.
The ECS motherboards support all the latest processors
and have an upgrade path for future
processors. One
thing that does bother me about most of ECS motherboards are the ram slots, most
of them only have two slots for ram, this means that you have to put in more
than you currently want or pay for an upgrade at a later time and waste the
money that you put in the ram at the start of your project, I would suggest you
put a minimum of one gig DDR 2 memory module and leave the other slot open for
upgrade at a future time. This board uses PCI-X for the integrated Gigabit LAN
and video cards, which is great because it only has two PCI-X slots.
Mfr Part Number: 945G-M3 V3.0
CPU: Socket 775 support Intel Core 2 Duo/ Pentium D/ Pentium 4/ Celeron D
processor; Support Hyper-Threading Technology; FSB 1066/800/533 MHz
Chipset:
Intel 945G & ICH7
Memory: 2x 240pin DDR2-667/533/400 DIMMs, Dual Channel, Max capacity 2GB
Ports: 8x USB 2.0 ports (4 rear, 4 by headers); 2x PS/2 ports; 1x Serial
port; 1x Parallel port; 1x VGA port; 1x RJ45 LAN port; Audio I/O jack
Power Connector:
1x 24-pin ATX Power Supply connector, 1 x 4-pin ATX 12V
connector
Form Factor: Micro ATX, 24.4 x 24.4 cm
Rating:
I am rating this 8 out of 10. An 8 because of the real estate on the board is
not used to the full capacity, the board could have one or two more PCI or PCI-x
slots, it could also have four slots for ram instead of two. If you want to use
the onboard Video you would not want to play games or have a high powered
graphics program unless you had the full two gigs of ram because the video
shares the ram with the processor, anything less than a gig will cause the
system to be a dog. For a everyday business pc this mother board will suffice at
a fair price.
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