jmke

Frankly speaking, the new ECS product surprised our seasoned staff in the platform department of our web site so much that some of them expressed quite radical opinions — not to test this motherboard at all. You can see the troublemaker well on the photo — the proprietary slot, which is nearly as long as the board itself. An S.D.G.E card to be installed there (it's included into the bundle and is not sold separately; the card is not optional, as the motherboard does not start up without it) provides full-speed functionality of two PCI Express x16 slots. Right after the announcement of this product we assumed that ECS decided to cut down expenses and adapted a motherboard with a cheap nForce4-series bridge (probably nForce4 Ultra) to support two full-speed PCIEx16 slots instead of designing a "normal" model, having soldered the sterling nForce4 SLI X16 chipset. We assumed that the Duo-N card also houses a cheap nForce4-series bridge, which will support the second graphics slot. That is a customer will be offered an every-little-helps kit, which is only formally compatible with nForce4 SLI X16, but cheaper and problematic in assemblage.

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