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Posted by
Toby
Crundwell on March 20, 2002
Company: EliteGroup
Product: L4S5A
Socket 478 motherboard
Look
for the lowest motherboard
prices.
 ECS
(Elitegroup) recently sent us their new Socket 478 (mPGA)
motherboard based on the SiS 645 chipset for evaluation here
at 3DS, namely the L4S5A. Supporting 166 MHz DDR memory and
a FSB of up to 400 MHz and a promising feature set, I had
high hopes for this multi-colored board. SiS, not having as
much action as Via as of late, hope to cash in on the
potential of matching up new, fast Pentium 4 processors with
DDR memory.
The package was supplied with the
de-facto manual, floppy cable and single IDE cable. Since I
have had other motherboards supplied with four double wired
IDE cables, the single IDE cable seemed rather stingy on
ECS' half. I guess it helps to cut down costs, and most
system builders should have spare IDE cables aplenty, but I
would have thought that ECS would see fit to include at
least one cable capable of data transfer over UDMA 33
(Notice that this was the case of the review unit we were
sent, no word if double wired
IDE cables are included on units being sold by retailers).
Onto the crux of the package, the purple
board itself seemed quite well designed. The full six white
PCI slots were present, along with a CNR shared with the
sixth PCI slot, and a standard AGP 2.0 slot. Although I
prefer AGP Pro slots to accommodate the larger AGP cards,
this at least did have some sort of plastic retention clip
which held my large Titan 2 Ultra in securely. The CPU
socket had a steel ZIF lever, always preferable to the
cheaper plastic ones supplied even on high-end boards. I
have broken these arms before, so its good to see a steel
arm even on a low-end board like the L4S5A. The bold orange
Northbridge chipset heatsink was not fitted with a fan.
Perhaps ECS thought that obscuring the bright orange was not
preferable to keeping the heatsink cool. In any case, it
cuts down on system noise, and a fan can always be fitted
later if so desired. The layout was adequate, with IDE
connectors to the right of the board, and the ATX power
connectors (both standard and the additional 12 volts) on
the top left of the board. This would cause the power loom
to drag over the CPU socket in some cases, but I was able to
simply route the loom around the socket. Similarly, there
are quite a few polarized capacitors to the left of the CPU
socket, which I had reservations about in regards to CPU
heatsink installation.
The floppy drive connector has to be in
the WORST position it could be, on the opposite side of the
board, causing the cable to drape over the rest of the
board. That is, unless you have your floppy drive at the
back of your case. Or, like me, you don't use a floppy drive
at all. The board only had one half-sized serial port, and
no additional sound connectors beyond the standard stereo
input and output and mic. Given that the other board that
was shipped to me on the same day (Soyo Dragon Ultra), based
on exactly the same chipset, gives an additional rear and
sub/central stereo outputs and two optical and two coaxial
(SP/DIF) connectors, I really think ECS could have done
better, but then again it's a reminder of who ECS is aiming
this board at. Still, at least the optional RJ45 port was
included for Ethernet functions, always welcome as a cheap
addition that often comes in useful. One thing I did find
strange was that the "power" LED mounted on the
motherboard did not light up when there was power to the
PSU. It only lighted up when the system was active. This is
not essentially "bad", just different, an
microcosm for the rest of the motherboard perhaps. The DIMM slots are
vertically placed at the right of the board, rather near the
AGP slot. In fact, so near, it was to cause me problems in
the installation of the L4S5A.
The contents list boasted a
"cooling fan retention module", which didn't seem
to be present. I can only assume this was, in fact, just the
plastic clips mounted around the motherboard CPU socket
(which are present on all other such motherboards). I was
meant to get an I/O panel, but this was not included. Which
was rather awkward, seeing as the rear I/O connectors were
unorthodox (more on this later). Similarly, the
specifications on the web site listed "Four Extra USB
header (LUSB1/USB3 or LUSB2/USB2)" and "Smart Card
Reader Header". These do not refer to external
connectors, just the pin connectors on the motherboard.
"HDD LED" "Reset Switch", "irDA"
and "Power Switch" headers are also all listed in
the specifications, but again these just refer to the pin
connectors on the motherboard. I seriously wonder what
motherboards actually don't come with reset and power
headers. ECS included two identical driver CDs. The
manual was adequate but not special, but at least it did
feature brief French and (what I assume is) Taiwanese
instructions, as well the extended English section.
-
Socket 478 for Intel® Pentium® 4
CPU
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SiS®645 Host/Memory controller with
DDR333 and AGP 4x North Bridge
-
SiS®961 MuTIOL Media I/O
-
LPC I/O - IT8705F
-
System Hardware Monitor: Built-in
IT8705F
-
LAN: RealTek 8100/B (optional)
-
AC97 Audio Codec
-
Compliant with AC97 2.1
specification
-
Three 184-pin DDR DIMM sockets to
support:
-
Three 2.5V DDR SDRAMs
(DDR266/DDR200) or
-
Two 2.5V DDR SDRAMs (DDR333)
-
Maximum: 3GB (2GB only for DDR333)
-
Award 2MB Flash EEPROM
-
Supports Plug and Play 1.0A, AMP
1.2, Multi Boot, DMI
-
Full Support for ACPI revision 1.0
specification
-
SiS®961 built-in 256 bytes of CMOS
SRAM
-
PS/2 keyboard and PS/2 mouse
connectors
-
Dual USB Ports and an optional LAN
connector
-
One EPP/ECP/SPP mode parallel port
-
One 16550 serial port
-
Audio Ports (Line-in, Line-out,
Mic-in, CD-in and game port)
-
Dual PCI IDE interfaces - support
four IDE devices (PIO mode 4, DMA Mode 2, Ultra DMA
66/100)
-
Supports 360K~2.88M Byte, 3 Mode
FDDs or LS120
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ATX12V Power Supply Connectors
-
CPU, BAK and CHS Fan headers
-
LAN Card Wake Up / Modem Ring
Wake-Up
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6 PCI slots, 1 AGP slot, 1 CNR slot
-
ATX (305mm*244mm), 4 Layers
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