ECS is really starting to get attention in the enthusiast segment with its latest line of Extreme motherboards. Though they are not exactly "extreme" in terms of overclocking, the affordability factor and stock performance of the board makes it a desirable option for the non-overclockers. Not only is ECS entering the enthusiast market with Intel and AMD platforms, but the company has actually come up with a very intuitive concept of combining both platforms onto a single motherboard. ECS’ PF88 Extreme motherboard was first displayed at Computex this June, and throughout the event, ECS was flooded with questions regarding the workings of the motherboard and the overall concept. Today, hopefully, we’ll be able to answer some of the critical questions for you.

Here’s what ECS has in mind with the PF88 Extreme motherboard: You would be able to purchase a SiS based Intel motherboard off of retail shelves once it’s launched. If you decide to upgrade to an AMD platform at a later date, ECS would retail a daughter-card with socket-939 platform, which would be plugged into an additional slot to get the system up and running. According to ECS, the retail cost of the daughter-card would be around $50.00, though the price is not yet finalized. ECS believes that it would reduce the upgrade cost in the future when the user decides to upgrade his system, which is true to an extent. However, there are certain aspects of it that you’ll have to keep in mind. Since it’s a preliminary article, we’ll present our initial thoughts on the board in Part II of the series. So, the idea is that once you have connected the daughter-card to the actual motherboard, you can then utilize all the features on the board with both AMD and Intel setups. The peripherals support is shared via a SiS southbridge that works as the "middleman" between both platforms – a unique concept indeed.

Image Courtesy: ECS

Although we don’t particularly like to comment on the board layout during our initial look, we’ll make an exception and delve just a little bit to see what, if anything, ECS has done to accommodate both platforms. The base of the motherboard is based on Intel’s LGA775 platform powered by SiS north and southbridges. The board is color-coded with a passive heatsink on the northbridge to dissipate heat. We would’ve preferred it if ECS had opted for an active heatsink, but we have a feeling that extreme overclocking wouldn’t be an option here, so maybe in that regard it’s fine with whatever it has at the moment. The top part of the board is featured with four DIMM slots for dual-channel memory configuration in addition to the power connector and IDE connectors. The bottom area of the board has SATA ports, the southbridge for peripherals support and PCI and PCIe slots. The components are laid out rather cleanly and shouldn’t propose to be much of a concern when everything is plugged in. Overall, the PF88 has a fairly standard layout with an additional slot to house a daughter-card for the AMD socket-939 platform.

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