ECS P4VXASD2+ <--any good?

[rrcn]

Does anyone know anything about ECS mother boards? Is this a good board and is it ok for OCing?

Here are the specs:

P4 socket 478
533 fsb
Chipset: VIA Apollo P4X333 North Bridge and VIA VT8235 South Bridge
Memory: 2 DDR DIMMs (supports PC2100 / PC1600), 2 SDRAM DIMMs (PC133/PC100), 1 Gig unbuffered max or 2 gig buffered max
2 Ultra DMA 133/100/66/33
6 USB 2.0
4 PCI
1 AGP (4X)
1 CNR slot

Any feedback about this board is helpful.

Thanks for your time.

[Peter M]

Welcome here!

ECS mainboards are cost-effective, no-nonsense boards. You won't find any overclocker's toys on that one.

Besides, pairing a P4 processor with SDR RAM is a bad move, the P4 being incredibly dependent on having fast RAM at its side.

So if you have a lot of old SDRAM memory to recycle and want to build a new system, you should go the Athlon route - simply because the AMD processors do a lot better with slow RAM - thanks to their much superior caching strategy. ECS K7S5Apro is the usual choice of mainboard for that kind of job, then.

If you intend to get new RAM anyhow, use a more modern board design with nothing but DDR RAM slots.

[rrcn]

well i want to go the P4 route, what kind of board would you recommend? i'm looking for something i can OC a little.

thanks for your advice.

[Roy]

I've selected the Abit IS7-E, based on test reviews at www.anandtech.com/mb/index.html . I'm still accumulating the parts and have not yet put the system together.

You can see examples of overclocking results for many processors in the CPU Database at www.cpudatabase.com/CPUdb/ . Each entry shows the mobo and cooling method as well.