ECS C19-A SLI Motherboard Review

Conclusions

ECS C19-A SLI is a good and cheap motherboard. It brings an excellent performance. excellent overclocking capability and is at the same time the cheapest socket LGA775 motherboard supporting SLI technology that you will find on the market.

With it you can enjoy the excellent cost/benefit ratio from Pentium D 805 CPU, which has a low price point and great overclocking potential, and assemble an excellent PC without spending a lot.

It is really impressive how ECS was able to make a motherboard with excellent performance, quality and support to the latest technologies (Gigabit LAN. SATA II, NCQ, SLI. eight-channel high definition audio) costing so little.

You need to be careful about this motherboard, though. First, its NCQ feature only works if you install a chipset driver above version 8.25, which is available here.

The second problem is that this motherboard has a flaw where its main x16 PCI Express slot doesn’t work at x16 even if you have just one video card installed.We were lucky to perform all our tests with just one video card installed first, where its x16 PCI Express slot was really running at x16, but after testing its SLI mode the motherboard didn’t come back to normal mode, locking the x16 PCI Express slots in SLI mode (x8 mode), reducing the transfer rate of the main x16 PCI Express slot. We tried everything possible to solve this issue, from clearing CMOS memory to turning on the motherboard without any video card installed to see if it came back to normal.

Instead of fixing this issue, ECS changed this motherboard specs on their website, now claiming that both x16 PCI Express slots run at x8 all the time, regardless if you are running on SLI mode or not.

If you don’t mind lacking a second on-board LAN and FireWire ports. ECS C19-A SLI is today the best option for you to build a high-performance SLI system (and you can even use Pentium D with it) spending very little.