ECS RS482-M Motherboard Review

Conclusions

Who has the best on-board video, NVIDIA or ATI? ATI was better on 3DMark03 and NVIDIA on Quake III. On the other tests they were tied. We can say they are technically tied. NVidia has a GeForce 6100 running at a higher clock rate, called GeForce 6150, which should achieve a higher performance than standard GeForce 6100 and Radeon Xpress 200. However, this isn’t important, as both achieved a lousy 3D performance and you can’t run modern games on them.

Talking about the chipset technical specs, SB400 south bridge used on ATI Radeon Xpress 200 is far inferior than NVIDIA nForce 410 south bridge – and keep in mind that nForce 410 is the simplest south bridge from NVIDIA nowadays.

Even though SB400 brings four Serial ATA ports, they are from previous generation, not supporting SATA-300 and NCQ. To make things worse, SB400 USB ports have a lousy performance compared to other chipsets available on the market.

ECS RS482-M presented a performance equivalent to its competitor, WinFast 6100K8MA-RS from Foxconn, which uses the competing chipset from NVIDIA, GeForce 6100.

When we installed an add-in video card on this motherboard it achieved a performance between 5% and 6% below the performance achieved by Foxconn WinFast NF4UK8AA-8EKRS – which is a mainstream motherboard based on nForce 4 Ultra chipset – on 3DMark05, Doom 3 and Quake III.

This was expected, since ECS RS482-M is a simple and low cost motherboard. But its main competitor, Foxconn WinFast 6100K8MA-RS, achieved the same performance level of our mainstream nForce 4 Ultra-based motherboard when we installed a “real” video card on it (except on Doom 3), surpassing the reviewed motherboard from ECS on those tests.

Another deception was on the overclocking capability of this motherboard. Even though it has some overclocking settings, this motherboard was unstable (i.e., hanged, froze, etc) even when we tried to configure a very light overclocking. The memory timings adjustments are incomplete and also made our system very unstable whenever we select anything other than “auto”.

We don’t understand why ECS made such incomplete work on RS482-M BIOS.

Of course to demand a high overclocking capability and memory timing settings from a low-end motherboard is too much, but its main competitor, Foxconn WinFast 6100K8MA-RS, brings all this and it is cheaper than this model from ECS.

So if you don’t care about overclocking and memory timing adjustments that can improve your system performance, ECS RS482-M is a reasonable option.

However if you want to overclock your low-cost motherboard, a better performance when you install a “real” video card and more memory configurations, buy Foxconn’s model.