ECS P35T-A (V1.0) – Features

Although ECS may not produce the most desirable motherboards in the industry, they are amongst the cheapest and as a result they tend to sell quite a lot of them. Last year ECS ranked third in terms of most motherboard sold only behind ASUS and Gigabyte. Surprisingly while ECS tends to ship quite a large number of motherboards they currently have just one Intel P35 board on offer.

Furthermore, while we did receive our ECS P35T-A motherboard about two months ago, the board still appears to have next to no online presence. At least at this point we cannot find the P35T-A for sale anywhere so it is difficult to evaluate the value of this product given we are yet to learn what its true retail price is. Our contact at ECS suggests this board will sell for around $100 which is a reasonable price given what is on offer.

The P35T-A is the only motherboard included in the roundup that uses the ICH9DH southbridge chip. The ICH9DH is a stripped-down version of ICH9R with no RAID support while featuring all six SATA ports. Also like the ICH9 the ICH9DH features support for a total of twelve USB 2.0 ports rather than the ten offered by the ICH9R southbridge chip. So for those that do not wish to use RAID, the ICH9DH is a nice compromise.

As you would expect from a budget board ECS has only included the essential third party controllers. This includes a single Intel 82566DC Gigabit network chip, Realtek ALC883 audio and a JMB361 chip for IDE and eSATA support. Other than this the P35T-A is fairly basic as you would expect for the suggested retail price of $100.