ASRock P452000-WiFi  ECS P45T-A (Black Series) Manufacturer  ASRock  ECS Category  Motherboard Socket  Socket 775 LGA Chipset  Intel P45 - DDR2 Editor  Winston Chim Share    digg this! " ... At least both manufacturers can now say they've managed to release their P45 based motherboards, designed and aimed at the mainstream maket. How good are they? ... I'll let you decide."

Advertisement ▼

The Battle of the Mainstream P45 motherboards begins. Who will win ... ASRock or ECS ?

INTRODUCTION

As the popularity of Intel's P45 chipsets increase, so will the number of motherboard manufacturers using these chipset increase. What we are now seeing in the past few weeks, are manufacturers like ASRock and ECS using these P45 chipsets, and producing motherboards that really appeal to the mainstream user. In our last few reviews, we've concluded that Intel's P45 is a very capable chipset, and has already proved to be a winner among the higher-end mainstream market.

Both ASRock and ECS have made serious attempts this year to increase their brand awareness among the higher-end mainstream market. During both the Cebit and Computex exhibitions ... the two companies have show cased their high-end motherboards, in which they hope to attract more enthusiasts. Whether these enthusiasts will take ASRock and ECS as serious choice remain to be seen. Still, you can't criticize ASRock or ECS for trying.

ASRock has made real progress over the past 6 months, and they've grown from strength to strength. This is evident from the large product range which they've amassed, and also through their aggressive launch of their product releases.

ECS is the acronym for Elitegroup Computer Systems. They've been in the motherboard game as far, and as long as I can remember. They've never been really considered as a manufacturer of high-end enthusiast motherboards, and they wouldn't be considered as a competitor against the likes of Asus, Gigabyte or MSI. I remember most ECS motherboards were aimed at the lower-end and budget market, whereby the motherboards offered very little in features, and the packaging was kept to a minimal to reduce costs. Yet, ECS for the past decade have been one of the top selling motherboard manufacturers in the world. And I remember, not so long ago ... they over taken Asus in motherboard production of actual units (mostly cheaper/budget motherboards). Things don't stop there. ECS have recently announced that they will be introducing their high-end motherboards namely the "Black Series"  this year, which is what we will be looking at later.

 

In this versus battle, we'll taking the ASRock P45R2000-WiFi and the ECS P45T-A (Black Series) to the test. So what do these companies offer to the mainstream user in terms of performance, value and features? These are the questions I hope to answer. It will be interesting to see how these two motherboards will fair in our tests.

From the outset, both motherboards utilise the Intel P45 chipset and ICH10R southbridge. Both features DIMM slots for DDR2 ram, supports Crossfire configuration, and all Intel socket 775 including dual and quad core 45nm processors. However, there are several features that the ASRock have which the ECS don't. These include the support for DDR3 ram, SPDIF optical/coaxial, firewire, dual gigabit ethernet and onboard WiFi ... all of which, the ECS P45T-A seem to lack. So for round one in terms of features ... the ASRock P45R2000-WiFi is already looking a winner here.

Closer examination of the board itself, will reveal that the ECS P45T-A uses some solid capacitors and some normal capacitors, while the ASRock uses all solid capacitors. This instantly tells us that for longevity ... the ASRock might go a little further than the ECS. For chipset cooling, both motherboards lack a heatpipe cooler, instead they opt for a standard heatsink for both northbridge and southbridge. I guess the heatsinks are more than adequate to get the job done, and it helps to reduce the overall costs.

We'll be testing both motheboards using our trusted old Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 @ default 2.4Ghz, OCZ DDR2-1066 SLI-Ready 2Gb Kit, a Radeon HD3870 512MB DDR4, PC Power & Cooling Turbo Cool 860W PSU and a 19" Dell Ultrascan P990 monitor. Windows Vista with native DX10 was used as our OS.

Ok, let's start by taking a look at the Intel P45 chipset specifications ...