VIA P4X266 Motherboard Roundup - The Forbidden Five - January 2002

ECS P4VXAD

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As we mentioned in our Comdex 2001 coverage of motherboard manufacturers, ECS has by far the most complete Pentium 4 motherboard line out of all of the manufacturers. They are currently shipping boards based on the Intel 845, SiS 645 and VIA P4X266 chipsets.

The P4VXAD is one of the more mature P4X266 solutions that is current available on the market. The board is fully supported by ECS and you can easily download BIOS updates and drivers for the board from ECS' website. The expansion potential of the board is very similar to the other boards in this roundup and like most of the rest, the board wasn't 100% stable with all DIMMs populated as it wouldn't complete any of SYSMark's Office Productivity tests.

Another complaint we had was the lack of any ATX12V connector on the board. Just as we mentioned in our 845 DDR roundup, this isn't a problem if you have a high quality power supply capable of delivering enough current to the CPU but if you have an older power supply it may not work with the board. Just because the ATX12V connector isn't present doesn't mean that any power supply will work.

Just as we noticed in our 845 DDR roundup, ECS has a habit of offering a small list of FSB frequencies instead of offering FSB frequencies in 1MHz increments.

The P4VXAD uses Avance Logic's ALC201A AC'97 codec and Realtek's RTL8100 10/100 Ethernet controller to make the board just as feature filled as the Acorp but without the stability problems.

ECS also makes a Socket-423 board based on the P4X266 chipset as you can see below:

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The Socket-423 version offers support for both DDR and regular SDRAM:

To further extend their Pentium 4 lineup, in the 2nd quarter of this year ECS will offer the P4VXAD with the new P4X266A North Bridge.