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ECS RS480-M


Date
: 01/4/06 – 02:05:09 AM

Author
:

Category
: Motherboard

Page 1 : Index

Manufacturer
: ECS

Price
: $64.99 Newegg

ECS, Elite Computer Systems, has been serving the industry since 1987. With a head office in Taiwan, ECS has partners and distributors in over 60 countries and serves the market with its manufacturing facilities. They are capable of producing 2.5 million motherboards in a month at there facilities in China. Before the mass quantities can be produced, it's imperative that quality comes first. ECS has become a popular name with enthusiasts with products such as the KN1 SLI Extreme motherboard.

Today
Overclockers Online
has opportunity to review the
RS480-M 1.0
. We'll take a look at how well this
ATi Certified
Radeon Xpress 200 chipset works out. For 65 dollars (at the time of writing) this could turn out to be a great board for that HTPC or office PC.

Page 2 : Package

The
RS480-M 1.0
arrived at my place in its retail package. The package clearly shows the company name, logo and product name. ECS also proudly displays the "AMD Recommends" badge, and at the bottom right corner lists a few features: designed for Microsoft Windows XP, Graphics by ATi Radeon XPress 200 with graphics embedded and Music Elf. That's right, Music Elf….

It appears the mascot for this package looks directly in your eye, possibly to get your attention and have you pick up the ECS RS480.

If you turn the package over, you see the other half of the mascot, but more importantly you get a number of features.

A total of 13 features are listed; a larger and clearer image will be provided later in this review.

The package contents and bundled software are also provided at the bottom of the box.

The sides of the package are rather simple, only the company logo is shown.

There is one very important piece of information missing from this package and that is the socket the RS480-M utilizes. While I know it is socket 939, it's not explicitly written anywhere. It certainly would have been useful if specifications were printed on the bottom of the box instead of the other half of the cobra.

Flip over to the next page where I'll give you the full specifications.

Page 3 : Specifications

The following information was taken from the
RS480-M
website over at ECS.

This type of information would certainly be handy to read while you're at your local computer shop. While it's not necessary to have the full list, a brief section would clear up a number of questions.

The features shown on the bottom of the box are reproduced below.

The features and specification spell out what could end up being an excellent motherboard.

Page 4 : Package Contents

Once you lift the lid on the package the first thing you see are the accessories. Being a small box, it doesn't take very much to fill it up.

Included in the accessories bundle is a driver CD, floppy and IDE cables, SATA connector, 4 pin molex to SATA power cable, rear IO panel and manual.

Under a sheet of cardboard supporting the accessories is the motherboard protected in an anti-static bag.

Taking the motherboard out, there is a sheet of foam supporting the underside of the motherboard.

We'll proceed with a look at the layout of the motherboard.

Page 5 : Layout

We'll begin with a look at the entire motherboard:

As you can see, this is definitely a micro-atx motherboard. This simply means it has fewer features than your fully fledged ATX motherboard. At the same time, the smaller board means you don't need to have a massive tower sitting on your desk and you generally don't have to pay as much.

The first thing we're going to look at on this motherboard are the IO ports.

For the most part, this is a very standard layout. One thing we don't see very often is a FireWire port. This is great if you intend on building a multimedia machine as you'll never know what kind of ports you will require.

At the top left corner of the motherboard, we have a few capacitors, the 4 pin power connector and the three phase power center.

There's certainly not a lot of cooling here, but since they are so close to the CPU socket, a decent cooler should provide some airflow over these components.
To the right of the capacitors and in the center of the board is the CPU socket. The components around the socket are not very tall so you should have no problems installing any cooler you want. The biggest problem some may face will be running out of space in your case, particularly if you are using a cube case.

Right beside the socket is the model number. You will also see the two blue DDR DIMMS on the RS480-M. These are of course dual channel capable.

You can see the Phoenix BIOS sticker right beside the 24 pin power connector.

To the far top right corner of the motherboard, in the bottom of the picture below, are the power , IDE and floppy connectors. It's nice to see that ECS has adopted the 24 pin power connector; there are still a few boards out there that use the 20 pin.

Below the IDE connectors are the four SATA connectors. To the left of them is the passively cooled southbridge.

The bottom right edge of the motherboard is jam packed with additional connections.

The speaker is soldered directly onto the motherboard with no option of disabling it. A jumper with a convenient handle is available if you need to clear the CMOS. Beside the speaker is the Lithium battery and at the very corner are the jumpers for the switches and LEDs to the case. Following along the edge we run into two USB connectors for a total of eight and a FireWire connector.

Continuing across the edge of the board, we run into a few more connections. First up is the communications port, followed by the standard audio selection – audio output to generally the front of the case, CD In and Aux In.

If you haven't noticed, each major component is labeled by ECS. An example of that is the 6-CH Audio printed right by the audio ports and controller.

Realtek is responsible for the 6-channel audio and the 10/100 network controller. Beside the two Realtek chips are the PCI slots – 3 PCI and 1 PCI-E x16.

Directly above the PCI-E x16 slot is the ATi Radeon Xpress northbridge. This component is also passively cooled.

There's nothing special on the back of the motherboard. A plain purple PCB with the stock CPU support bracket and a number of solder joints.

Page 6 : Chipset

The chipset used on the
RS480-M
is commonly known as the ATi Xpress 200. However, there are variations of this chipset that you may not be aware of. The RS480-M is
not
the latest ATi Xpress 200 chipset motherboard as ECS actually has a newer model of this board that uses the 482 chipset. The reason why we're taking at look at this particular board is because it's easy to find in stores and the difference between the 480 and 482 is minor.

Where is the difference between the 480 and 482? Size, and size does matter. With the RS480, it uses a .13µm die while the RS482 users a 11µm die. Upon manufacturing, the smaller die will save everyone a bit of money. As most know, the RS480/482 has the equivalent graphics power of a X300, and so it supports all DirectX 9.0c games. The performance is a completely different matter.

Here's a little flowchart of what the
ATi Xpress 200
is responsible for:

A full list of the specifications can be found on this image:

Not all of these features are available on the RS480-M. If you're looking for the TV-Out, the RS482-M will have it.

For futher details about the Xpress 200 chipset, please refer to the ATi website, particularly this page for chipset features and this PDF brochure.

Let's get this puppy installed and benched!

Page 7 : Installation

It's time to get our components installed and see how the ECS RS480-M performs. For this review, I will be using the AMD 3200+ Venice core processor. I will be using the Thermaltake Golden Orb II for cooling, so step one is to replace the stock retention system and pop in the Thermaltake goods. Here's a quick shot with the CPU installed:

One thing I noticed with the DDR DIMMs is that they are a tad to close to the socket. In some circumstances, you may need to remove the CPU Cooler before replacing the memory. This would include coolers similar to the Golden Orb II only larger.

I will not be installing the motherboard into a case, since I do not have a micro-atx case, and putting this in an ATX case won't make the installation procedure any harder. That said, everything will be laid out on my desk.

During the installation, I did not have any problems installing any of my components. There was plenty of space between the CPU Socket and the PCI-E X16 slot. Everything was connected in 20 minutes and we were installing the operating system in no time!

Page 8 : BIOS & Overclocking

The Phoenix BIOS on this RS480-M is a toned down version of a very standard BIOS. There are a few missing options, and so I'll give you a pictorial run down of all that is available.

That covers all the interesting BIOS features.

When it came to overclocking, there aren't too many tweaks. I'm using my AMD 3200+ "Venice" and my OCZ PC4800 Platinum Elite Edition and all I could get was 225*10 out of the processor. This is a pretty small gain on the processor, but as a micro ATX motherboard, it's
not
typical for them to be geared towards extreme performance, and so a free gain is a good gain.

Page 9 : System Benchmarks

Here's a complete list of the hardware used in this benchmark:

Our suite of benchmarks includes PCMark 2004 and 2005 to test the overall system performance. Default settings will be used for these benchmarks. In addition to PC Mark, Super Pi 1M, 2M and 32M benchmarks were completed to test the performance of the CPU and memory. Everest and SiSoft Sandra were also used to gage the memory performance. SiSoft CPU benchmarks were also run. ScienceMark v2.0 32-bit will be used to test the system performance and the final piece of software we will run is HD Tach v3.0 to test out the SATA performance. All of the system benchmarks were completed with the integrated graphics.

Without any further ado, the benchmarks!

We'll start this section off by taking a look at the general performance as reported by PC Mark 2004 and 2005.

From the numbers, it's clear that using the integrated graphics takes a toll on the overall system performance. The largest drop in performance with the integrated graphics comes during the memory benchmarks; we see a drop up to 10% in the reading and writing department. When comparing the performance to the nForce 4 chipset with a standalone video card, the two go head to head. Still, the nForce 4 SLI chipset manages to edge ahead in all the benchmarks.

Page 10 : Graphics Performance

One of the beauties integrated graphics is that for day to day office use, you don't even have to buy a video card. That means for a 65 dollar motherboard, you get to save a few extra bucks on buying a low end GPU. The downside is that the performance is not very good. We'll compare the performance of the integrated graphics processor to that of the PowerColor X700 Bravo with 3DMark 2001SE, 2003 and 2005. After the synthetic benchmarks, we'll try out Half-Life 2, Doom III and Battlefield 2. It should make for some rather interesting numbers.

Based on the results, we can tell that if you plan on playing any of the newer games, an investment for a graphics processor with its own dedicated memory will be an excellent idea. Even at the lowest resolution these games are not playable. However, some of the older titles and will play fine and suit the occasional gamer.

However, if you know you only plan on keeping the RS480-M around for work and the occasional movie, I'm happy to report that the onboard X300 has no problems keeping up with any movie I threw at it. Even the action packed flicks like The Matrix did not stutter, distort or lag.

Page 11 : Conclusion

The
RS480-M
has turned out to be an impressive little work machine capable of doing more if you put in the money for a good video card. While the ATi Xpress 200 chipset is still relatively new, the abundance of people moving over to micro ATX makes it an ideal choice for SFF/HTPC machines. This is exactly where the RS480 fits in. Despite only having the power of an X300, you won't notice any problems while watching your favorite movie. Where the RS480-M can improve on is being bundled with VIVO, or at least TV-Out. Thankfully the RS-482 by ECS has us covered.

Comparing the performance to the nForce 4 based Albatron K8SLI, our little RS480-M went neck and neck only taking a large loss in performance when SATA II could be factored in. While it did score lower in every benchmark by a small margin, going with the RS480-M will save you a few bucks and still deliver comparable performance!

Advantages

Very affordable
Good performance
Integrated graphics great for everything but the latest games

Disadvantages

Lacks SATA II capabilities
No TV Output

Overclockers Online would like to thank ECS for making this review possible.