Intel 845E Motherboard Roundup - August 2002

ECS L4IBAE

The ECS L4IBAE comes loaded with goodies, as is the norm with most of the 845E boards today.

One of the features we always like to see in a motherboard is onboard IEEE 1394a (FireWire) support. There are two 1394a cable ports located just below the South Bridge and just above the two yellow RAID connectors. IEEE 1394a is still the preferred method of data transfer for most bandwidth-needy products like digital video camcorders, digital cameras, and other such products. Of course, there's also onboard USB 2.0 (two rear USB 2.0 ports) with support for as many as 8 USB 2.0 ports.

ECS also decided to include an onboard Promise RAID (PDC20265R) chip. This particular RAID controller isn't anything special among the many other RAID controllers we've seen in other 845E boards here, especially since this particular RAID controller only supports ATA100 (100 MB/s) and not ATA133 (133MB/s) like most others. Additionally, the Promise PDC20265R controller supports RAID 0 (striping) and 1 (mirroring) arrays.

The L4IBAE also utilizes some of the 845E's native features like sound and LAN. ECS choose to take advantage of the 845E's support for AC'97 6-channel sound (Realtek ALC650) as well as the 845E's 10/100 LAN chip (Realtek RTL8100B). There's also lots of room for expansion with 6 PCI slots in addition to good memory flexibility, with a total of 3 DIMM slots for up to 2.0GB of DDR200/266 memory.

In general we liked the L4IBAE's layout. Everything is well positioned if you're using a standard ATX case. In addition, a somewhat large, black passive heatsink cools the MCH.

Stressing and Overclocking the L4IBAE

We ran the L4IBAE through our usual suite of stress tests to see if we could find any significant problems. With all 3 DIMM slots populated with Kingston DDR266 memory at default settings (SPD timings) the L4IBAE was able to run Prime95 torture tests for 24 hours straight. In addition, we encountered zero problems when we ran SPEC, Sysmark, UT2003, JKII, and Q3A with all three DIMM slots populated (instead of running all those benchmarks with just one DIMM populated as we usually do).

The L4IBAE also comes with some good overclocking options. You can push Vcore as high as 1.85V in .025 increments, DRAM as high as 2.8V, and the FSB as high as 200MHz in 1MHz intervals. However, this board lacks an AGP/PCI lock, and therefore shouldn't really be considered the ideal board for serious overclockers.

As far as price is concerned, you're supposed to be able to pick up an ECS L4IBAE for $90-95 depending on your location. When you consider that you get sound, LAN, RAID, 1394a (FireWire), USB 2.0 and 3DIMM/6 PCI slots, that's an incredible price.

ECS the Company

Having looked at ECS's L4IBAE 845E-based motherboard, we'd now like to turn your attention to another part of ECS's business that has been doing extraordinarily well, and that's their new line of notebooks, dubbed the i-Buddie series. It's certainly not weird to see mainboard makers aiming for different markets; top-tier motherboard maker ASUS is firmly committed to gaining share in the notebook space as well, with four different notebook lines to choose from.

It has been revealed that ECS expects to ship around 400,000 i-Buddie Desknotes by the end of this year. However, ECS is still committed to the motherboard market, and for good reason; ECS has the lowest cost-structure out of any motherboard maker in the industry. In fact, ECS's cost-structure is so low that other mainboard makers have contracted ECS to manufacture their motherboards. For example, Shuttle outsources a good portion of their motherboard designs to ECS, and just recently ABIT confirmed that they would have ECS produce all of their low-end motherboards from now on (some are even saying that ABIT has expressed interest in having ECS manufacture all of ABIT's motherboards). ASUS, on the other hand, decided to go it alone and manufacture a whole new line of low-cost motherboards, which go by the name Asrock. In general, we see this recent trend of consolidation as a sign of tough times in a very competitive market, spurned by an underperforming world economy in the past couple of years.