Installation and Testing pg3

The next section of the BIOS to look at would be ‘Integrated Peripherals’ , this is where you can manually set certain things for your hard drives like PIO mode or DMA mode if need be, and where you can enable certain features of your hard drives. From this section you can configure your RAID setup, any onboard devices like USB, USB keyboard, USB mouse, AC97 audio and Giga lan. The Super IO sections allows you to enable/disable FDC controller, serial port, parallel port, UART and ECP modes.

‘Power management Setup’ is for power management, hmm kind of self-explanatory, you can set various options in here including enable/disable AMD Cool’n’Quiet and Hammer Fid Control.

The PnP/PCI Configurations screen is very basic, just a couple options here, the ability to configure plug and play devices, IRQs, and PCI configurations.

The last menu would be PC Health Status, not much to do here but look, there are two changeable options, the Shutdown Temperature and whether you want the 20/24 pin message to show up…

Sadly I can’t run the SLI, I just got a 7900GT and I am trying to get another one to match it, but I did notice that there are no jumpers on the board or anything to change for SLI mode. I can only really compare it to my DFI board and as I mentioned I have found it to be a much better all around board, ti seems much more stable, while the options are limited, sometimes you don’t need them and just want a nice stable system with a few frills thrown in.

The ‘frills’ that ECS puts in are nice, you can have yourself a decent gaming rig based of this board and I believe it will be nice and stable. You can have nice eight channel surround sound, Giga Lan and SLI included. This board is labeled ‘Lite’ but it is not a ‘lite’ board at all, don’t let the name fool you, there are lots of features for even the hardcore overclocker to appreciate.