Just built a system for a friend who is on a very tight budget, so we got the cheapest dual-channel DDR mobo we could find for a socket 478 P4 cpu. The ECS (Elitegroup) model 865PE-A is selling for US$55 at the egg and various other online dealers. I was a bit skeptical of this mobo since there is virtually no reviews anywhere on the web, except for one on ECS's own website. This board has got a lot of features for a $55 unit that supports 400/533/800 cpus, dual channel DDR memory, SATA, EIDE, audio, 10/100 lan, and more USB ports than you'll ever use.
It ain't really an overclocker's mobo, even though it'll let you set the FSB base clock at any value from 100 to 250 MHz in 1MHz increments. It doesn't seem to have any way to adjust the voltages, except maybe by using the cpu pin wire tricks if you care to try that.
I put in a 1.6GHz Northwood cpu that was a beautiful overclocker at 133x4=533FSB for total 2.13GHz in an ASUS mobo at stock voltage. In the ECS 865PE-A, this chip will boot Windows at that speed and do mundane things just fine, but as soon as you put some stress on it, like UT2004, it'll crash the game pretty regularly and even blue-screen Windows occasionally, cpu temps are staying in the low-mid 40's C at peak loads. I backed the FSB clock down to 125MHz and it runs rock-stable under load. ~2.0GHz and upper 30's to low 40's C peak temps out of this chip still ain't too shabby. I'd bet that more voltage on the cpu would let it run stable at 133 FSB clock once again, but I'm not going to bother with that since the machine is more than adequate for all it'll be used for.
One thing that's very curious however, is that I'm able to run a pair of cheapo Kingston 256MB CAS-2.5 sticks of PC2700/333MHz "Value Ram" in this mobo at CAS-2 settings in dual-channel mode and the boot up screen reports them to be running at full 400MHz. I never got these sticks of memory to run at 400MHz in my ABIT NF7-S mobo. I wonder if that number is true or not. Anyway, the machine performs quite snappy... feels even faster than when this cpu chip was running at 2.13GHz in my old ASUS P4T-E system that's in my sig.
If you need a dirt-cheap dual channel P4 mobo, this one seems to be a pretty decent value for the money.
It ain't really an overclocker's mobo, even though it'll let you set the FSB base clock at any value from 100 to 250 MHz in 1MHz increments. It doesn't seem to have any way to adjust the voltages, except maybe by using the cpu pin wire tricks if you care to try that.
I put in a 1.6GHz Northwood cpu that was a beautiful overclocker at 133x4=533FSB for total 2.13GHz in an ASUS mobo at stock voltage. In the ECS 865PE-A, this chip will boot Windows at that speed and do mundane things just fine, but as soon as you put some stress on it, like UT2004, it'll crash the game pretty regularly and even blue-screen Windows occasionally, cpu temps are staying in the low-mid 40's C at peak loads. I backed the FSB clock down to 125MHz and it runs rock-stable under load. ~2.0GHz and upper 30's to low 40's C peak temps out of this chip still ain't too shabby. I'd bet that more voltage on the cpu would let it run stable at 133 FSB clock once again, but I'm not going to bother with that since the machine is more than adequate for all it'll be used for.
One thing that's very curious however, is that I'm able to run a pair of cheapo Kingston 256MB CAS-2.5 sticks of PC2700/333MHz "Value Ram" in this mobo at CAS-2 settings in dual-channel mode and the boot up screen reports them to be running at full 400MHz. I never got these sticks of memory to run at 400MHz in my ABIT NF7-S mobo. I wonder if that number is true or not. Anyway, the machine performs quite snappy... feels even faster than when this cpu chip was running at 2.13GHz in my old ASUS P4T-E system that's in my sig.
If you need a dirt-cheap dual channel P4 mobo, this one seems to be a pretty decent value for the money.
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