A Better Look at Things pg2
The ECS NF650iSLIT-A motherboard is purple in color, some people don’t like the purple but I do, it’s different. The PCIE slots are colored coded, as are the Ram slots. You’ll notice though ECS put the IDE ports in a very odd place, essentially on the bottom of the board, why, I don’t quite know. Other than the position of the IDE connections, the layout is nicely done and the board is rather attractive actually. The bottom of the board is rather plain just very purple…
We’ll start the tour of the motherboard at the back, the I/O area, which is a bit sparse actually. This motherboard features 8-Channel, HD audio, something that you might not expect to see on a budget priced motherboard, it also features Coaxial and Optical S/PIDF audio outputs if you need them. There is also a serial port there as well, but I have to ask why? I personally haven’t used a serial port in years, and I don’t know anyone that does either, why do we still have them a standard on the back of the motherboards?
Next stop on the tour would be the CPU socket area, we have a standard LGA775 socket, with the four mounting holes around it. To the top right of the socket we find the four-pin fan header and below that is a three-pin fan header that is labeled System Fan.
Below the CPU socket we have the North Bridge where ECS provided an active cooling solution, it’s small and quiet so it should not get in the way of anything, and quiet is always nice.
To the right of the North Bridge Chipset are the DDR2 slots, four of them, color coded. On the edge of the board on the other side of the DDR2 slots is where we find the main ATX power connector and the floppy drive connection.
A Better Look at Things pg3
Below the DDR2 slots we have four SATA connections, these are the newer 3Gb, with backwards compatibility of course, and the BIOS chip is located next to them. To the left of the SATA connections is where the South Bridge is located, it has passive cooling, with a somewhat smallish heatsink on it, but it won’t interfere with the video cards which is good thing.
Below the SATA connectors and the BIOS chip we find the oddly places IDE connections. In between the connections is where we find the Front Panel header, and the left of that the Clear CMOS jumper, and right under that jumper is the external speaker connection. I quickly found that you need to connect your Front Panel BEFORE you connect the IDE cables…
To the left of the IDE connections, along the bottom edge of the motherboard we have two additional USB headers, bringing the total to eight USB ports for this board.
On the far left, under the three PCI slots we have the CD-in header and Front Panel Audio header.
Above the three PCI slots we have the PCIE slots, only running at 8X though.
Above those, and next to the North Bridge, we find two more power connectors, a standard Molex connection for added power to the PCIE card and a 4-pin 12v power connection for the CPU.
And finally along the far left edge of the board we find the Marvell Lan Chipset and the Audio Chipset.
That’s it for the tour of the ECS NF650iSLIT-A motherboard, move onto the next page to take a look at the BIOS and all it’s settings…