jmke

LONG A STAPLE in the budget world, ECS recently turned its attention up market with an "Extreme" line of motherboards geared toward enthusiasts. ECS's first Extreme offerings were reasonably solid boards, but despite flashy colors and neon extras, they lacked many of the tweaking and overclocking options that enthusiasts have come to expect. Undeterred, and apparently eager to improve, ECS pressed on and introduced a new wave of Extreme boards, including the PX1 Extreme for Intel's new Core 2 processors.

At first glance, the PX1 looks promising. The board is built around Intel's latest P965 chipset—complete with a Viiv-compliant ICH8DH south bridge—and features passive chipset and VRM cooling, dual PCI Express x16 slots, two Gigabit Ethernet controllers, and eSATA and Firewire connectivity. A BIOS update also gets you support for CrossFire configurations and even Intel's latest quad-core processor.

Of course, it's easy to fill out a spec sheet. To really appeal to enthusiasts, the PX1 Extreme also has to deliver competitive performance and impeccable stability alongside all of the tweaking and overclocking options that ECS boards have typically lacked in the past. Read on to see if it does.

http://techreport.com/reviews/2006q4...1/index.x?pg=1

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