ECS Photon AF1 Lite V1.0 Platinum

In complete contrast to AOpen's minimalist packaging is the graphics-heavy offering from ECS. Not only does it feature a space ship on the front, but there's also a cardboard kit of the said spaceship inside the well filled box. If you like your Athlon XP motherboards colourful with lots of LEDs, then the AF1 from ECS is the board for you.

The Northbridge cooling fan has an array of six coloured LEDs that flash in sequence, there are LEDs to indicate the type of AGP card installed - yellow for AGP 4X or blue for AGP 8X - and each PCI slot is accompanied by a blue LED.

Leaving aside the gimmicky, flashy bits, the AF1 is built on a six-layer PCB for improved stability. It's a well laid out and there's plenty of room - even the memory can be changed without removing the graphics card. It's built around VIA's KT600 chipset, a single channel memory solution for AMD's Athlon and Athlon XP processors. The VIA VT8237 Southbridge supports the two SATA and four USB 2.0 ports.

The board comes in three versions: Deluxe with RAID, FireWire and Gigabit LAN; AF1 without RAID; and the AF1 Lite, which lacks the RAID and FireWire controllers and has 10/100Base-T Ethernet instead of Gigabit Ethernet.

The six-channel audio is controlled by a C-Media CMI9739A chip that is compliant with the AC97 2.2 specification and supports coaxial and optical S/PDIF output ports. Network duties are taken care of by a 3Com 3C920 chip.

Instead of the usual dual BIOS setup, ECS includes a Top Hat Flash module, which installs on top of the original BIOS. Once the BIOS has been flashed the module is removed.

Included with the AF1 are E-IDE cables, floppy cable and SATA cables, an expansion plate with two USB 2.0 ports, and a bracket for installing two USB ports in a 3.5in bay.

Contact: Protac (01908) 481800
www.protac.uk.com

See also:

ECS steps up UK and Ireland drive

Taiwanese giant merges with UK distributor  27 Sep 2004

Sparkle nForce2 400

Well known for their graphics cards Sparkle have now released their first motherboard.  30 Mar 2004

AOpen AK89 Max

This motherboard is packed with goodies.  26 Mar 2004

Gigabyte GA-8TRS300M

A motherboard with integrated sound, networking and graphics.  16 Mar 2004

Biostar M7NCD-A02

Looking for a low-cost, no frills Socket A motherboard? Biostar's M7NCD may be the answer.  15 Mar 2004

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