On-Board Processors

For quite a while ECS has been manufacturing motherboards with on-board processors (processor soldered to the motherboard at the factory). Those boards are marketed under several brand names, such as PCChips, ECS, Amptron and Eurone, just to name a few. PCChips is a brand that belongs to ECS, while Amptron and Eurone are ECS customers (ECS manufactures them boards and simply glue the “Amptron” or “Eurone” tag where we would usually find the ECS one).

In the table below we have compiled a list of all ECS, PCChips and Amptron motherboards that use on-board processors. Boards in the same row are identical. PCChips M810DLU v. 7.5C and ECS K7SOM+ v. 7.5 C are identical, for example. The only difference between them is the color, since boards manufactured to be sold under the PCChips brand are usually red, while those manufactured to be sold under the ECS brand are usually purple.

PCChips	ECS	Amptron	Chipset
M810CDLU v. 5.2C	K7SOM+ v. 5.2C	K7- 810DLMx	SiS 730D
M810CLR v. 7.1	K7SEM v. 3.0C	K7- 810CLMx	SiS 730S
M810DLU v. 7.5C	K7SOM+ V. 7.5C	K7- 810GLMx	SiS 740
M810L v. 9.0m			SiS 730S, 256 MB on-board RAM
M825LU v. 7.2C	L7VMM3 v. 1.0	K7- 825GLMx	VIA KM266
M825CLU v. 5.2	K7VMM+ v. 5.2C		VIA KM266
	P6VEM3 v. 3.0		SiS 630E

On the motherboards sold by Amprton, “x” indicates the CPU used, as listed below.

“x”	CPU
3	1300+
4	1400+
6	1600+
8+	1800+
2K+	2000+
21+	2100A+
2+	2200A+
4+	2400A+
7+	2700A+
26+	2600A+
3K+	3000A+
31+	3100A+

Deceitful Naming

The biggest problem is that ECS/PCChips/Amptron use deceitful naming to classify the processors soldered to their motherboards. It all started with the P6VEM3 v. 3.0 model, which had a 733 MHz VIA C3 processor soldered to the motherboard, on which, instead of the name VIA C3 it read Giga Pro, making the consumer erroneously think that it was a one gigahertz processor, which is not true.

The other motherboards listed case use a Duron, an Athlon or an Athlon XP processor, and ECS/PCChips is using deceitful naming for those processors, gluing a sticker to the processor fan where we read something like Pro 2000+, for instance, so you erroneously think it is a 2 GHz Duron, which is not true. In the following table you see the correspondence between the ECS/PCChips names and the real processors. Recently ECS/PCChips started to use also Athlon and Athlon XP processors. When the name has an “A”, it is one of these CPUs.

Renamed Processor	Real Processor
Pro 1200+	Duron 850 MHz
Pro 1300+	Duron 900 MHz
Pro 1400+	Duron 950 MHz
Pro 1600+	Duron 1 GHz
Pro 1800+	Duron 1,2 GHz
Pro 2000+	Duron 1,3 GHz
Pro 2100A+	Athlon 1,1 GHz
Pro 2200A+	Athlon 1,2 GHz
Pro 2300A+	Athlon XP Mobile 1400+ (1,2 GHz)
Pro 2400A+	Athlon 1,3 GHz
Pro 2600A+	Athlon XP 1400+
Pro 2700A+	Athlon XP 1500+
Pro 3000A+	Athlon XP 1700+
Pro 3100A+	Athlon XP 2000+