Elitegroup one in many board makers to build specifically for gamers in a budget, with the range of Intel and AMD based platform, with some enhancements on the board over overclocking and also in a budget that, we in the place can manage. The Intel X48 is in Intel terms as the extreme edition to support the Intel Core 2, with the 50% price rise with the thing and only a quarter of the increase of performance can sometimes we spend too much for it, plus the DDR3 memory. But ECS came up with a way to have this beast of a chip to more budget hands; with just $240 just to spend the motherboard alone is a good buy with some major brands going up to $300 to $400 for the X48.
With the ECS, is the usual treatment of hat-sink with some kind of copper alloy and one heat-pipe running around the board, with also a large Northbridge heat-sink with some really thick with a large amount of space between the fins, where the heat-pipes pass. With that you have the problem if a large bulky after market cooler, with the Northbridge Heat-sink so close to the CPU socket and also the first memory slot. And the Memory being way low in the board in just the middle, you may expect to remove a long graphics card just to jack in the memory.
With the exception that, when you enable dual graphics like for example, dual 4870×2’s you may have to kiss the two or even three SATA ports good bye. With the expansion slots, are given with two PCI slots and also two PCIex x1, with the IDE inconveniently placed in the bottom of the board. And just to add the power connectors are also place in one of the most inconvenient place in the middle of the board where the heat-pipe touches it.
With the others six USB ports in the back and also dual PS/2 ports, Dual gigabit ports and with two in and Out SPDIF port for optical connection to in some cases to connect to your PS3 for a fast internet connection, with an ATX 4-pin power connector on top of the expansion slot. They have some corner cutting in the board like older electrolyte capacitors in the bottom and the placement of the power connector and the IDE port.
The performance is okay with the memory and CPU overclocking, or make it manual overclocking, because the automatic can in turn mistaken the clock speed and the CPU type and when overclocking it can make it unstable over 100MHz way too high. But with the simple BIOS update to fix the problem, the one way that they should not do in the first place is the XMP DDR3 memory, with a short life span and an expensive DDR3 memory than others.
But for the budget X48 here is a disappointment, with corner cutting in the board, bad placements, and not to mention unstable over clock. It is best to keep away from it, but desperate for a cheap X48 chipset, and not an over clocker, this may be it.
