ECS PF5 Extreme

Overclocking:

When it came to overclocking the ECS Elitegroup PF5 Extreme, our experience was quite dismal. The Lakeport overclocking lock does indeed effect the motherboard's overclocking abilities, and in order to push the motherboard even marginally faster we had to enable the PCI Express clock synchronization from the BIOS. However, this does proportionally increase the PCI Express frequency upon upping the FSB. Pushing the overclock too far, we were unsuccessful in detecting the SATA drives as well as the video card initializing. The maximum point where we were able to run the motherboard stable inside of Linux was a mere 230MHz. No matter how much we increased the voltages, and configured the remainder options, the motherboard would refuse to properly boot above this frequency. Thus, the overclocking variables at which the motherboard ran were 3.45GHz (230MHz x 15) and DDR2-767MHz @ 5-5-5-13. Although the overclocking abilities were fairly poor, the board did boast LM_Sensors detection with v2.9.2. Using LM_Sensors, the w83627thf-isa-0290, eeprom-i2c-0-53, and eeprom-i2c-0-51 modules were loaded. Of the reported voltages, fan speeds, and temperatures, the values reporting inaccurate results were +12V, -12V, and temp3. Although the LM_Sensors detection was not perfect, it was much more satisfactory than other current LGA-775 motherboards we have experienced and their flakey compatibility.

Performance:

With the ECS PF5 Extreme boasting an Intel 945P Chipset, for comparison purposes we benchmarked this motherboard against the ASRock 775XFire-eSATA2 and Abit AW8. The 775XFire-eSATA2 is a new motherboard out from the folks at ASRock, and it comes similarly equipped with the i945PL + ICH7R. On the other hand, the i955X + ICH7R Chipset power the Abit AW8. In addition to these direct comparisons, we also ran the PF5 Extreme motherboard when it was overclocked at 3.45GHz and DDR2-767MHz.

As always, prior to the actual benchmarking we first looked over the fresh Fedora Core installation for any signs of incompatibilities or components not operating accordingly. With our installation, we had noticed no major problematic areas under Linux with the motherboard. As mentioned in the overclocking section, the LM_Sensors detection was satisfactory for the temperatures, fan speeds, and voltages. For testing the ECS Elitegroup PF5 Extreme motherboard, as well as the ASRock 775XFire-eSATA2 and Abit AW8, we used Enemy Territory, Doom 3, Quake 4, SPECViewPerf, HDparm, diskWriggler, Gzip Compression, LAME Compilation, LAME Encoding, BlueSailSoftware Opstone Sparse-Vector Scalar Product, BlueSailSoftware Opstone Singular Value Decomposition, and FreeBench.