Bundle and presentation
ECS has made a concerted attempt to break into the deluxe sector of the motherboard market. Originally known as volume producer of low-end motherboards, ECS has slowly worked its way into the realm occupied by the likes of ASUS, MSI and Gigabyte. Swanky packaging always helps. ECS makes particular mention of the PF5's Pentium dual-core CPU support.
The accompanying bundle does the job of facilitating the usage of all onboard features. A Parallel port can be connected via a provided bracket, and another adds in a couple of USB 2.0 ports and a single FireWire400. An external SATA bracket connects up to the back of your PC and allows you to hot-plug drives in, much like USB. There's also what ECS terms a Top-Hat flash module, which is useful in instances when the original BIOS chip becomes corrupted. The BIOS chips cannot be removed from the board so the Top-Hat module fits over it and allows you to flash the board chip with a working ROM. 4 SATA cables and branded ECS 80- and 40-pin cables allow you to access the board's storage potential immediately.
What's not so good, indeed we'd go far as to say it's pretty damn abysmal, is the accompanying manual. There's 14 small pages devoted to the English section that barely cover the basics. The PF5 Extreme has a myriad of features that need to explained to the novice user. None are covered in this paperweight. ECS needs to take a lesson from, for example, ASUS, whose manuals make installation of both hardware and software the cinch it should be.
Apart from the various drivers necessary for installation, ECS bundles in the above utilities. A better paper-based manual should be on the top of ECS' improvements list.
