BIOS

ECS has gone for something a bit different in the BIOS department, using an AMI setup. Its setup is almost identical to that of the more common Award setups, so going to AMI isn't as hard as you may think. AMI has picked up over the last few years with its tweak-ability.

ECS doesn't provide any overclocking options on this board, so we can't gauge it compared to that of the P35 chipset. Only a ratio divider option and voltage adjustments for the memory are provided.

Lastly we have a look at the Intel shared memory system for its integrated graphics. There are two modes you can have - fixed and DVMT. Fixed is when you set a certain amount of memory to be used for the frame buffer. You can have either 128MB or 256MB. In fixed mode this memory is always allocated to the graphics system. When you check in Windows, your system memory will be what you installed less either 256MB or 128MB.

In DVMT mode, only 8MB is allocated to the graphics card when in 2D operations. When you go to 3D applications a further amount of memory is allocated to give either 256MB of 128MB, depending on what you set in the BIOS. We used DVMT with 256MB total setup, so in our 2D application tests we had the most amount of system memory free.