ECS GF8200A Motherboard Review – GeForce 8200

Bundle and BIOS

The packaging that ECS uses is nice looking, though I do not get much out of dragons, space ships, race cars or evil beings on boxes.

The bundle is very thin, but this is a budget board, so costs are going to be cut somewhere. Included are two SATA cables, an IDE cable, the back I/O plate, the owners guide, a quick start guide and the CD that has all the drivers you need. Like I said, pretty thin bundle.

There is really not to much that is interesting in the AMI BIOS, so we will take a quick overview of things.

Standard CMOS setup page.

Advanced setup page is where we will find our HT frequency adjustment, as well as a few other things.

Advanced Chipset setup. This is where we can make adjustments to our DDR speeds and timings.

DRAM frequency needs to be set to manual to be able to set the speed yourself.

Timing mode needs to be set to both in order to set timings for your ram.

Hybrid SLI support needs to be enabled in the BIOS.

Integrated peripherals page.

The Health page.

The Frequency/Voltage page is where a great amount of time will be spent in tweaking your system.

North bridge voltage can go up to 1.24v.

HT voltage can go up to 1.35v.

CPU voltage has to be set to enabled in order to have control over the CPU voltage settings.

CPU voltage can go up to 1.55v.

CPU frequency can go up to 598 FSB.

That is really everything of any interest in the BIOS. Let’s get on to the testing!