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#709 - ECS C51GM-M AM2 Motherboard |
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Written by Zach Jeffers
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Thursday, 03 August 2006 |
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Page 2 of 5
Packaging and Layout:
Geeks.com sent all three items to me in a standard brown shipping box with the items surrounded with plastic air pillows; very nice in my opinion (packing peanuts are messy). Included in the C51GM-M's retail box is the Motherboard, I/O plate, User's Manual, Drivers Disc, a power Molex to SATA power connector, a single SATA data cable, a single PATA-133 ribbon, and lastly a single Floppy ribbon.
Looking over the ECS board, you can see that it is a nicely compact mATX motherboard with not a whole lot of bells and whistles, but enough functionality to keep the average user happy. At the back of the C51GM-M motherboard, you can see that it comes with a single PCIE x16 slot, a single PCIE x1 slot, and two standard PCI slots for your add-on cards. These days, you don't really need a whole lot of expansion space for PCI cards, but ECS provides enough room to add a better sound and tuner cards for example. Towards the front of the board you will see that there are two included SATA ports, a integrate system speaker, two IDE PATA ports, a 24-Pin power connector and a single Floppy port.
Looking at the motherboard from the top, you can see how well everything is laid out. No crazy positioning of any components here. You can see that the new AM2 socket is located directly between the I/O plate and the memory slots. To the left of the CPU socket, lay the nVidia 410 Northbridge cooled hidden by a passive heat sync. One should note that the way cooler bracket is mounted around the AM2 CPU socket, the air from a standard cooler will flow directly towards the I/O plate and memory. This is good for the memory, but unless you have a HSF that has omni directional air flow, your Northbridge cooler will not benefit from the CPU's airflow. On the underside of the motherboard, you can see the plastic back plate for the CPU cooling bracket.
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