Review: ECS PF88 Extreme Hybrid Mainboard

by Tarinder Sandhu on 12 May 2005, 00:00

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qabe5

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ScienceMark 2.0, Pifast

Looking at memory tests first.



When using the A9S convertor card and AMD Athlon 64 FX-53 CPU, ScienceMark 2.0 would repeatedly crash before spitting out the result. That's the reason why there's no figure shown there. Note, that with identical settings, i925XE has almost a 10% memory bandwidth advantage over PF88 Extreme.



Latency, too, is much, much higher than Intel's 925XE.



The performance colours to look out for are grey and orange, which represent the PF88 Extreme with either AMD or Intel CPUs. Pifast, though, runs just fine with the A9S card in place. In fact, the result is commendably close to a VIA K8T890's. On the Intel side of things, the PF88 Extreme is just over 5% slower than an i925XE, although 1% of that advantage is gained by using an inflated FSB.