ECS 755-A2 is a good performer. In our tests, we have seen for ourselves that the performance level is on par or slightly better than the SiS 755 Reference board. This is somehow what we didn't expect as ECS was once delivering BIOS of slightly lower performance in the past. Looks like ECS is making better BIOS and we see that the BIOS options enables us to tune up the board to our common test settings of CAS 2, 5-2-2. Although it can be adjusted, the BIOS is still limited because of the range of FSB, voltage levels it can support. 

This board only provides a very basic feature set-  USB 2.0, Ethernet, 6 channel audio. On top of that, there is SATA RAID 0 or 1 supported. Installation of this board is straightforward as it is all well documented on board or in the manual. The only thing I feel that could be improved the DIMM slots. It is way too tight. The colour coded front panel is definitely a good one for users who are not sure which pins which connector goes to.

In terms of overclocking, this board has only has a FSB range of up to 232Mhz. There are minor voltage adjustments for the Vdimm from 2.5v to 2.65v. It would be good if we can adjust it up to 2.9v and FSB increased up to at least 250MHz FSB. There is also no adjustments for Vchipset or VCore within the BIOS.

Our best aggressive timing is CAS 2, 5-2-2 with a single piece of Corsair XMS3500C2 DDR400 module. Again we are impressed by this fact that the system is rock stable and running at top performance at CAS 2, 5-2-2. We also removed the double sided tape from the chipsets heatsink and replaced it with thermal paste. This definitely cools the chipset a lot. Surprisingly the 964 SB is exceptionally cool.

Update : In our overclocking tests, we used our Corsair XMS3500C2 module running at CAS 2.5, 8-4-4. We managed to POST up to 232MHz FSB. Unfortunately, we can only get it to work well at 215MHz FSB steadily with 3DMark2001SE/2003. This also makes us suspect that a possible divider is in place instead of a fix pci/agp at 33/66 as the 3Dmark benchmark jumps back to the OS environment during its test at 220MHz. We tested again using CrystalCPUID, we can lower the multiplier but no matter how we try, we can't get over the POST screen.

Overall, if you are one that has been waiting for a cheaper Socket 754 K8 board for your Athlon 64 3000+ or 3200+ processor, 755-A2 might just be the entry board to 64 bits computing. With the ram settings available (not sure abt production BIOS), I would say that this board has not disappointed me. It was well worth waiting for this version 755-A2 as it was delayed since December 2003 till now.

I would highly recommend this board !

Suggested Retail : NA (Click link for more pricing)

Discuss & read more

Pros 好处:

• 6 Channel audio
• USB 2.0 
• Colour encoding of front panel
• SATA RAID 0/1

Cons 坏处:

• Limited DDR Voltage adjustments
• No Vcore, Vchipset adjustments
• FSB range up to 232
• Ram Slots a bit tight

Ratings

Here are my ratings out of 10 stars.

Highly Recommended