Ports, features and bundle
We'll finish our perusal of the board with a look at its ports and other features.
Fairly regular around the I/O area. No DVI for the integrated graphics, despite how much we love digital interfaces around here. ALC655 provides 6-channel audio for this board, HD-audio not available on UK versions of this board. As mentioned earlier, there's no FireWire provision for U.K. boards, either.
The RS485M-M's RS485 (what a mouthful) northbridge hides under a relatively plain heatsink with no fan. Residing in the chipset is the Radeon Xpress 1150 graphics, clocked at 400MHz core and 500MHz memory. At first the device identified as Xpress 1100 and was clocked 100MHz slower for the core, but a BIOS update changed the device ID (to 1150) and the clock speed, giving it a bit of a boost.
The heatsink for the SB460 southbridge is very small, posing no threat to any expansion cards. Combined, the north and southbridge chips need no active cooling (although we always recommend a well-ventilated case) meaning the motherboard itself can operate silently.
Bundle
Aaargh, a snake! Seems ECS is inadvertently (or maybe even intentionally) in tune with web cartoon culture.
In the bundle is an I/O shield, manual, driver disc, floppy and IDE cables along with SATA power and data cables. We think ECS's bundle is a bit stingy... two SATA power and data cables would sweeten the bundle a little without adding much cost. There's no TV-out bracket either, which their was with the RS482-M.
Features are basic, but sufficient, though the lack of a TV-out bracket in the bundle is disappointing.
