Review: ECS C19-A SLI

by Ryszard Sommefeldt on 13 April 2006, 09:00

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qafew

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BIOS

The BIOS is usual AWARD fare with board-specific customisation by ECS. The two main performance adjustment screens are show below.



You can see memory timing adjustment, Vdimm and Vcore adjust and bus clocking options all available. The BIOS helpfully tells you what your new settings will result in, speed and timings wise, too. We'd like to see more vendors offer up a similar feature in their custom BIOS screens.

There's also adjust of the HyperTransport bus multiplier between C19XE and MCP51 chips, just incase you're overclocking.


One of the fan headers (FAN1) has a threshold-based adjustment scheme, allowing you to set start and limit temperatures, start PWM percentage, and the percentage the PWM circuit raises and lowers the speed per degree celcius change in heat. We've had liked to have seen that level of detail available for control of all the other fan heads on the board, including that of one atop the C19XE, but it's not to be for this board. The single header adjust is most welcome though.

Vdimm goes to 2.20V maximum, up from 1.80V standard and in 0.05V steps. CPU adjust is 1.10V (Conroe-esque Vcore min) to 1.60V in 0.0125V steps, should you need to adjust it.