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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 3 of 5
A Closer Look:
Taking a look at the I/O area at he back of the board, you can find the keyboard and mouse PS/2 ports, a single Parallel port, a single Serial port, a single VGA port, four USB 2.0 ports, a single 10/100 Ethernet port and lastly the three 1/8" audio jacks. Directly behind the I/O ports, you can find the three power MOSFETS and a number of capacitors. A note for picking a CPU HSF is that there is not much room between the CPU cooling bracket and the I/O area, including the power capacitors
 
Below, you can see that the nForce 410 Southbridge does not require any sort of cooling as it does not work as hard as the Northbridge. Next you can see the
black, passive, cooler for the nForce 410 Northbridge. It is held into place with two plastic "push-through" pins that are spring loaded for balanced
pressure. Removing the passive cooler, you can see the exposed Northbridge and evidence of the pre-applied thermal compound. In this shot you can also see
the required 4-pin power connection from the PSU.
Taking a look at the C51GM-M's main power connection, you see that the board comes with a sticker covering the additional four pins. This is due to the fact that the ECS C51GM-M does not require you to have a 24-Pin PSU, but rather can facilitate either a 20-Pin or 24-Pin PSU! Very nice for those that might be upgrading just the Motherboard, CPU, and memory. On the other side of the motherboard, you will find the two internal USB 2.0 headers along with the jumpers required to clear the CMOS in the event of something going wrong. It was very nice to see that the included pin jumper was a tabbed one. This makes it extremely easier to do by hand, thus not wasting time trying to find those darn needle nose pliers!
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