(Review) - ECS has been garnering quite a bit of attention with new internal strategies, recent introduction of enthusiast boards, firm production contracts and whatnot. Perhaps the most interesting thing to look for, from an enthusiast’s point-of-view, is ECS’ recent innovations and technologies. One such example is its AMD/Intel hybrid motherboard solution, which would allow you to insert AMD and Intel microprocessors (with coherent components) in the same board (AMD is supported via a daughter card) to make the board expandable and upgradeable in the future. Although the limitations are there, it’s possibly the only concept that makes upgradability in the long run a viable option at somewhat of a low price.

Please visit "Part I: ECS PF88 Extreme Intel/AMD Hybrid Motherboard" and "ECS, Hybrid Motherboards and The Future!" to read our take on ECS’ hybrid motherboard and how it can be economically friendly.

While the hybrid motherboard concept is all well and good, ECS is back with another technology that’s worth analyzing. Welcome ECS’ SDGE, or Scalable Dual Graphics Engines, technology. The basic concept behind SDGE is to combine the functionalities of NVIDIA’s SLI and ATI’s Crossfire technologies to come up with an in-between solution. Though it’s tough to prove without actually testing the technology, but you would logically expect something like this to also have more complications than any of us would like, but let’s go through SDGE and see where it stands as opposed to SLI and Crossfire.

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