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Reviews Around The Web
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Choose Web Reviews from this Maker:
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Thursday, August 14, 2008
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ECS is very popular on the low-end segment, so we were really surprised to see this company launching a good high-end solution. The Hydra kit contains two GeForce 9800 GTX+ running at their default clock configuration and one Thermaltake BigWater 760is water cooler. The video cards come with the cold plates already assembled, so the only work you will have to do is to connect the hoses coming from BigWater to the video cards and fill the water tank with the coolant liquid that comes with the kit. We took an in-depth look on Hydra, check it out.
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Friday, August 8, 2008
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Since 1987, Elitegroup Computer Systems has been providing motherboards to the masses and now stands as the fourth largest manufacturer in the world. I will be taking a look at ECS' latest creation, the P45T-A, based on Intel's fantastic P45 Express chipset. The motherboard arrived at HardwareLogic's West Coast Lab and immediately demanded attention with its 1333 FSB, CrossFire support, eSATA, 8 channel audio and 16GB of DDR2 capacity. And since its from ECS, you know its affordable. Take a few minutes to check out this review as I throw the P45T-A motherboard on to my test bench for some serious benchmarking. How did it do? There's only one way to find out.
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Monday, August 4, 2008
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The ECS A770M-A motherboard is based on the AMD 770 chipset and supports the latest AM2+ processors available (up to 95W TDP). It provides four DDR2-1066 capable sockets, one PCIe 2.0 x16 slot, eight channel HD audio and eSATA. This affordable board provides the basics you would need to build a budget AMD system and allows you to save your cash or spend it on other components. If you happen to be in the market for a reasonably priced, no frills motherboard you will want to check out this review. Read on to find out if the A770M-A has what it takes to be the foundation of your next build.
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Tuesday, July 29, 2008
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When AMD had unveiled the ATI Radeon HD 4850 and ATI Radeon HD 4870 last month, NVIDIA was left in an awkward position. The Radeon HD 4850 had sharply outperformed the (more expensive, at the time) GeForce 9800GTX, which led NVIDIA to immediately begin slashing prices and introducing a slightly faster GeForce 9800GTX+ that ramped up the memory and core frequencies. ATI's flagship Radeon HD 4870 also had no problems competing with the more-expensive GeForce GTX 260 / 280. Many of NVIDIA's partners as a result have slashed their prices on their earlier GeForce 8 and 9 products. One of the NVIDIA products that was previously considered a good budget graphics card was the GeForce 8800GT, but now how does it stand up against the latest from ATI and NVIDIA? In this article we are looking at the ECS GeForce 8800GT. What is particularly special about this card and some of the other newer models shipping the GeForce 8800GT GPU is a BIOS revision that should yield a performance increase.
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Monday, July 21, 2008
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For the budget-minded consumer, the ECS GF8200A is a pretty good deal. For $70 USD, the board has the features to build a good gaming PC or a HTPC with the integrated graphics with the caveat that there is no digital audio output and DVI port. The benefit of having DirectX 10 integrated graphics include: PureVideo HD playback of Blu-Ray discs and the ability to use the Aero UI in Windows Vista. GeForce Boost is an interesting concept but with it working only on the 8400/8500 cards is limited in usefulness to most people as they might be better served buying a 9600GT and using the integrated graphics in an emergency. Hybrid SLI shows performance increases in most of the tests but in others it shows the same performance as the 8500GT by itself.
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Thursday, July 17, 2008
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The BIOS might not offer the most exhaustive set of tweaking options, but you do get more than you might expect. Couple the overclocking potential with onboard reset and power buttons, as well as other desirable features for desktop and HTPC usage, and the GF8200A definitely has an appeal that can cover a wide array of users.
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In short, this inexpensive motherboard is fast, stable, and features a ton of opportunities for expansion. While the lack of firewire is indeed a disappointment, I believe that this can be taken as a non-issue for gamers. Considering the features present, the speeds attained, and the stability of the system overall during the testing procedures, I feel that this motherboard is a good buy if a user is looking to assemble a low cost, reliable gaming machine. It's just a shame that this product doesn't have what it takes to break free of just what it was meant to do, but given the fact that it costs just shy of $110 - or rather, is shockingly cheap, I would say this is a good candidate for the great value award!
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Thursday, July 10, 2008
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GF8200A Black Series is an entry-level socket AM2+ motherboard with on-board video from ECS based on GeForce 8200 (MCP78M-A) chipset from nVidia. Since it features an HDMI output, this board is clearly targeted to users willing to build a media center PC based on an AMD CPU like Athlon X2. In this review we will compare the performance of GeForce 8200 to its main competitor, AMD 780G. Check it out.
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Let's see how general requirements to entry-level motherboards agree with what ECS engineers have in mind. This company is quite experienced in designing low-end motherboards.
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Wednesday, July 9, 2008
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If you take a budget chipset and mix it with a company like ECS you will get an incredible priced motherboard. In this case you will get the P43T-A2. The P43A is ECS's first P43 motherboard on the market. Even with all its short comings compared to the P45 this board offers the everyday Joe with everything they would need to build a stable and very complete system.
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Thursday, July 3, 2008
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ECS Black Edition motherboards give a reasonably high end motherboard factor with a price that is extremely affordable. Its certainly a step-up from their usual low-priced motherboards and today we look at their recently launched Intel P45 chipset solution modeled as the P45T-A Black Edition.
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Wednesday, June 18, 2008
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I have finally gotten my chance to review one of their products. The product on the bench here today is the A770-M socket AM2+ motherboard. Before I even received the board I browsed a few online stores to get a good ideal on pricing. In the case of the A770M-A we were able to find it for roughly $65. This is in range of Asrock and some of the board they manufacture. But is the ECS as stable as the competition? We will find out.
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Monday, June 9, 2008
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AMD's progress of late has been rather slow. With Phenom being initially delayed due to poor clocking, and then being bitten by the TLB bug in its B2 stepping core, AMD's Phenom has been a late bloomer. Although it has now come out of its shell, it's still not able to kick Intel off the performance ladder. Today we are testing out ECS' AMD 780G chipset variant that is designed to replace the 690G chipset which was very popular as a value option. How does ECS' 780G compare to the ASUS 780G we have already tested? Let's take a gander.
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Monday, June 2, 2008
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So, what we have here at the end is a "sleeper" graphics card. In the auto world, they?re cars that people drive around that don't look fast, but packs a powerful engine hiding underneath. These are called "sleeper" cars. While they have a meek facade, they'll surprise the racer next to him once the race begins. The ECS 8800 GT 256MB Graphics Card has replaced the 8600 GTS and HD 3870 512MB cards in their entirety because it's that much faster. This is the new king of the budget cards that performs much better than budget.
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The ECS A780GM-A Black Series AMD 780G motherboard wound up being quite interesting. It offers quite a few appealing features, such as a back panel full of useful connections, onboard HD audio and video with HDMI output, an integrated RAID controller, support for AMD's Hybrid CrossFire and their new Phenom processors. With such a selection of goodies onboard, the relatively low price initially seems too good to be true.
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