Product News – New ECS Motherboards To Ease Upgrading Pains

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ECS announced today two new motherboards that should ease the pain of upgrading to Intel’s latest chipsets. The 915P-A and the 915P-A2 use the Intel 915 chipset and support Intel's Pentium 4 ‘Socket-T’ LGA775 processor.

Up to now though, if you fancied upgrading to one of Intel’s new CPUs, it meant buying a new PCI Express graphics card as well. However, the new ECS 915P-A includes both an AGP 8x and PCI Express x16 slot. This is welcome news if you don't fancy buying a new card when you’ve just spent serious money on a recent top-end board.

Not only that, but the 915P-A also offers both current and cutting-edge memory slots. The 915P-A has two two 184-pin DDR1 slots and two 240-pin DDR2 slots. The 915P-A2 however, just has four 184-pin DDR1 slots. This provides no DDR2 upgrade path but does support up to 4GB of PC3200 memory.

Both ECS boards feature Intel’s new ICH6 Southbridge bringing with it four SATA and eight USB 2.0 ports.

These ECS boards sound like an excellent way of enabling users to upgrade their CPU and motherboard to improve I/O performance, while protecting investments in graphics and memory.

The dual DDR1/2 supporting 915P-A will have a retail price of £88, while the 915P-A2 will cost £81, including VAT.

You can look out for the boards at www.ecs.uk.com and both boards will be available in August from Protac Direct Sales on 08701 205370