Introduction

ECS are better known as the backbone of the OEM industry along with the likes of FIC, Jetway and Asrock. While ECS in the past have shown that they can produce motherboards of a high calibre, it is very few and far between.

The last motherboard that really impressed us from this company was their SiS 735 product many years ago, which was the first retail SiS 735 based motherboard. ECS have not been afraid to experiment with just about all the available chipsets on the market, since their primary sales are in budget and OEM segments.

Now ECS has seen that while OEM does provide a huge chunk of its profits, companies like ABIT, ASUS and even Gigabyte are doing far less in motherboard sales but pulling in more profit but for what reason? Overclockers - you guys! Though Gigabyte does do a lot of OEM, it is the overclocking side that brings in a lot of the bread, with motherboards far more valuable with overclocking abilities. With this in mind, around about a year ago ECS put its R&D team to some serious work to produce its full fledged I865PE Springdale series of motherboards, the Photon series.

Today we take somewhat of a flash-back look at the ECS PF1 Deluxe Photon motherboard which has been around for a good 12 months or more. Based on the I865PE Springdale chipset from Intel which has done wonders for the socket 478 Intel Pentium 4 in terms of performance in the past, let's see if ECS has pulled a rabbit out of the hat or just another old folk's type motherboard.

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