ECS P35T-A (V1.0) – Design

While the ECS P35T-A is a fairly feature-less motherboard, it's also not extraordinary to look at featuring the stock standard ECS purple PCB with a basic passively cooled setup. The ECS look and feel is something that is unique to ECS motherboards and it is difficult to mistake an ECS board for anything else. We are not terribly sure that this is a good thing since ECS boards do have that cheap vibe about them, even if they are anyway!

The northbridge chip features a very small silver aluminum heatsink while the southbridge is cooled via an even smaller aluminum block. There are of course no heatpipes on this motherboard and ECS has placed the board's biggest heatsink over the MOSFET chips which we found a little strange. The board layout is fairly crammed and as we have come to expect from ECS over the years, components have just been placed fairly randomly.

That said there are no obvious design flaws to be found on the P35T-A. The I/O panel features six of the twelve USB 2.0 ports while there are two PS/2 ports, six audio jacks, a single eSATA port and one LAN port along with an old serial port. The board only features support for a 4-pin 12v power connector while it does support 24-pin ATX power connectors.