Something new
Remember the purple-coloured slot and the second PCI-Express x16 slots from the previous page? It's kind of hard to miss them. That's how, in essence, ECS is able to turn the PF88 Extreme from an Intel-only mainboard into, at the moment, a S939 AMD Athlon 64-supporting board.
Bought separately for just over £30 including VAT, ECS offers its SIMA platform converter card, the A9S.
And there you have it. An add-in card that fits into the purple-coloured Elite Bus connector on the PF88 Extreme. The A9S supports all current Socket-939 CPUs and will also run dual-core X2s with a BIOS update. Power-delivery circuits and a 4-pin cable (that you remove from the mainboard and attach here) give the card the necessary power stability and juice. 2 DDR1 slots offer up to 2GB of system RAM that's run in dual-channel mode. ECS has chosen to go with incompatible DDR1 and DDR2 for AMD and Intel, respectively. It could have engineered the PF88 Extreme to run with LGA775 and DDR1, much like Intel's i915x chipsets. That would have eased the financial burden of switching over to AMD, as now you have to invest in not only a CPU but also in DDR1 RAM. ECS has tried to strike a balance between future-proofing LGA775, which is supported at 266MHz FSB and will rise in the future, and present DDR400 support for AMD's S939 CPUs. Given a choice, I'd liked to have seen DDR1 implemented on both sides. It would then have simply been a matter of purchasing the A9S and the S939 CPU of your choice.
ECS has used a SiS756 PCI-Express-compatible northbridge on the convertor card. There's very good, practical reasons for it, too. It carries the dual-channel DDR400 memory controller which connects up to the DIMM slots mentioned above. Being PCI-Express, it also feeds down to the second orange-coloured x16 slot on the motherboard. The first, used in an Intel-based setup, can't be accessed as the convertor card blocks the slot completely. Even if it could, it's mapped out for the SiS656 northbridge. In a conventional AMD S939 setup, the SiS756 is usually paired with the '965 southbridge; exactly the same southbridge that's already featured here. The convertor card, once positioned in the Elite Bus slot and activated by removing a bank of jumpers, disables the SiS656-SiS965 interconnect and forces the PF88 Extreme to run with the AMD-designed SiS756-SiS965 combination, again through a 1GB/s interconnect. Having said that, power is still being delivered to the LGA775 northbridge.
The space constraints of locating both an Athlon 64 socket and 2 DIMM slots are manifested in the inability to run a reference, PIB cooler that's shipped with high-end S939 CPUs. Note how, using Crucial Ballistix RAM, the first DIMM slot is blocked off, thereby inadvertently disabling dual-channel memory.
Installing an older AMD reference cooler or appropriate aftermarket heatsink cures the problem. A couple of Corsair XMS3200XL sticks have just enough room to breathe.
Look back to the previous page and you'll just be able to make out a two rows of black jumpers between the first PCI-Express x16 slot and the Elite Bus connector. These need to be removed when engaging the A9S add-in SIMA card. What you get is........
