Introduction

It's been all go for both AMD and Intel recently, what with both launching something new; AM2 and Core 2 CPUs, respectively. Then, of course, there's the whole AMD & ATI thing. It's perhaps fitting that today we're reviewing a motherboard with an ATI chipset, designed for AMD processors.

The board in question is from ECS and it's called the RS482-M, its name giving away the fact that it's powered by ATI's Xpress 200 chipset. In this case, the board we're looking at is a budget offering, with integrated Xpress 200 graphics and Socket 939 processor support. Of course, it's a PCIe board and Socket 939 still has plenty of life left in it yet, even for high-performance systems. So, could this uATX board prove to be a board that's good for having a bit of fun on a budget?

Let's see...

Specifications

We're no strangers to Xpress 200 here at HEXUS, so let's see what ECS have put together around it.

CPU Socket 939 for AMD Athlon 64 processor up to FX-60. High-performance Hyper Transport CPU interface. Support transfer rate of 2000/1600/1200/800/400 mega-transfers per second.

Chipset ATI® RS482 & SB400 North Bridge: ATI® RS482 South Bridge: ATI® SB 400

Memory Dual-channel DDR memory architecture 2 x 184-pin DDR DIMM socket support up to 2 GB Support DDR400/333/266 2.5V DDR SDRAM

Expansion slots 1 x PCI Express x16 slot 3 x PCI slots

Graphics On Chip (Radeon X300-based. 2D/3D graphic engine)

IEEE 1394 (optional) TI TSB43AB22A support 2 x IEEE1394a ports

Audio Realtek ALC655 6-Channel audio CODEC Compliant with AC'97 2.3 specification

LAN Realtek RTL8100C 10/100 Mbps Fast Ethernet Controller

Rear panel I/O 1 x PS/2 keyboard & PS/2 mouse connectors 4 x USB ports 1 x VGA port 1 x RJ45 LAN connector 1 x 1394a port(optional) 1 x Parallel port (LPT1) 1 x Serial port (COM1) 1 x Audio port (Line-in, Line-out, Mic-in)

Internal I/O connectors & headers

1 x 24-pin ATX Power Supply connector 1 x 4-pin ATX 12V connector 1 x FDD connector supports two 360K~2.88MB FDDs 2 x IDE connectors

4 x Serial ATA connectors 1 x IrDA for SIR header 1 x COM2 header (optional) 1 x 1394a header(optional) 2 x USB 2.0 headers support additional 4 USB Ports 1 x TV out header 1 x SPDIF out header 1 x Front panel switch/LED header 1 x Front panel audio header CD in/ AUX in headers CPUFAN/PWRFAN/SYSFAN connectors

Storage Supported by SB 400 -- 4 x Ultra DMA133/100/66 devices -- 4 x Serial ATA devices RAID0 & RAID1 configuration

System BIOS Award BIOS with 4Mb Flash ROM Supports Plug and Play 1.0A, APM 1.2, Multi Boot, DMI Supports ACPI revision 1.0 specification

Form factor Micro-ATX Size, 244mm*244mm

On paper, then, it looks like ECS has crammed plenty of useful things onto the board. Nothing jumps up as extraordinary, although that's not really to be expected if you're looking for a budget board. It's nice to see FireWire available as an option and it was present on the board we tested. It's also good to see the board will even handle AMD's top Socket 939 CPU, the FX-60, though we can't imagine many will find their way into the socket of this board.

Board layout

On to the physical, we'll start with a look at the board layout.

A top-down shot immediately gives this board away as a micro-ATX model. ECS's fetish for deep purple PCBs continues, along with a taste for blue, orange and pink connectors.

There doesn't appear to be anything around the CPU socket that would cause a major issue for the majority of coolers. The 4-pin +12V connector for the CPU's power circuitry isn't located in the best of places, but it could be far worse.

The 24-pin ATX connector is located in a fairly standard place, as are the floppy and IDE drive connectors, albeit packed together tightly. Still, on a uATX board there isn't the luxury of extra space into which such connectors can be spread.

Located close to the IDE connectors are the SATA connectors. They support Click Connect, should you have the cables, to keep them more secure. The connectors are far enough away from the expansion slots to allow them use without inhibition from any long PCI/PCIe cards.

Audio connections are located on the very edge of the board, not in the middle of the PCI slots or right up next to the I/O area, which is good. There are three PCI slots, so even if a large cooler is used with an add-in PCIe graphics card, at least two should still be useable for whatever users might want to plonk in them, say, a TV tuner or a better sound card.

Two Realtek chips are visible in the above shot. They are the 8100C network chip and the 655 6-channel sound chip. Nothing special in the sound department, but there's nothing wrong with the offering either.

Generally, a good layout on the RS482-M. A couple of gripes could be raised with the IDE connectors and the +12V power connector, but ECS makes up for it with well-placed SATA connectors.

Ports, features and bundle

Before we look at the bundle, let's continue examining the board and see what ports and features we're presented with.

Noteworthy items include the VGA connector for the onboard Radeon X300-based Xpress 200 graphics, along with the FireWire400 connector, four USB2.0 ports, an RJ-45 port and three audio jacks for the board's 6-channel sound. It'd have been nice to have seen DVI; is it too much to ask of a budget board?

In the RS482 northbridge resides the Xpress 200's integrated graphics chipset, amongst other things. It can allocate up to 256MiB of framebuffer via HyperMemory, allowing it to treat system RAM as its own, thanks to PCIe. It comes clocked at 301MHz core and 500MHz memory.

The SB400 southbridge ain't gonna get too hot, evident from its relatively small passive heatsink. The sundries hang off this, including the USB2.0 connections and audio support.

Bundle

Don't buy this board if you have a phobia of snakes. Only joking.

In the bundle we found a manual, driver disc, I/O shield, a SATA data and a SATA power cable, TV-Out bracket, and floppy disk & IDE ribbon cables.

It's good to see the TV-Out bracket provided. With its onboard graphics this uATX board could be a candidate for a media centre PC, making its TV-Out capabilities all the more important. Other than that, not exactly a gift basket of a bundle. The board supports SATA RAID, but doesn't bundle enough data cables to allow you to use it.

BIOS and issues

BIOS

Physical inspection out of the way, we dropped a CPU into the socket, populated the DIMMs and made our way to the RS482-M's BIOS.

CPU FID options ranged from 4x to the maximum x11 of the CPU, in 1x increments. VID started at 0.825V and went as far as the CPU's max of 1.550V, in 0.025V increments. The 'CPU clock' or HT reference clock, ranges from 200 to 250MHz in 1MHz increments. Voltage range on the DIMMs is quite limited at 2.55-2.70V in 0.05V increments.

Memory frequency values included 100/133/166/200/216/233/250MHz. There was initially no ability to change the CMD rate for RAM, but this was fixed with a BIOS update.

The graphics card memory clock can be specified if set to 'async' mode. Its options are 200/250/266/300/333/350MHz.

The basic controls appear to be there, but no real in-depth tweaking is possible.

Issues

We found one issue with this board and that was with Cool 'n' Quiet. With the feature enabled, rebooting from Windows would cause the system to hang during the subsequent POST. We've notified ECS of the issue, who haven't been able to replicate the issue as of yet. We believe it could be a combination of the Cool 'n' Quiet driver and the particular CPU stepping we used.

System setup and testing notes

System setup

At the time of writing, in the HEXUS.pipeline we've got a uATX Socket AM2 board from ECS. It's a similar kind of effort to the RS482-M, so we'll be comparing the benchmark results of this board, with that one. You'll be able to check out that board in full soon enough, but you'll get a sneaky peek at how it performs right here.

The boards have similar names... today we're reviewing the blue one!

ECS RS482-M ECS RS485M-M

Processor AMD Athlon 64 3500+ S939 AMD Athlon 64 3500+ AM2

CPU speed 2199.5MHz - 200MHz FSB 2199.7MHz - 200MHz FSB

Memory 2 x 256MiB Corsair VS512MKIT400 PC3200 (DDR1)

2 x 256MiB Crucial CT3264AA53E PC4200 (DDR2)

Memory speed 2.5-3-3-8 1T @ DDR-400 4-4-4-12 1T @ DDR2-488.8

ATI Xpress Radeon 200 256MiB HyperMemory (301/500)

ATI Xpress Radeon 1150 256MiB HyperMemory (401/500MHz)

Graphics card(s)

ATI Radeon X1300 PRO 256MB DDR2 PCIe 16x (594/792MHz)

Graphics driver

8.243-060404a-033273E-ATI

Chipset driver Catalyst 6.2 Southbridge driver package

BIOS Beta version dated 03/07/06 Beta version dated 28/06/06

Hard drive Seagate 160GB SATA (ST3160812AS)

Optical drive Sony DDU1615

PSU FSP 300-60THN-P(PF) 300W

Monitor AG Neovo E-17A 17in TFT

OS Windows XP Professional SP2

Both boards have the same rating CPU, albeit in different packaging and with different memory controllers on-die. RAM is therefore different too, although the same overall capacity. The only remaining difference is the integrated graphics; the rest is the same for both test subjects.

Testing software

• ScienceMark Memory Bandwidth • ScienceMark Memory Latency • Pifast calculation to 10M places • HEXUS Cryptography • KribiBench • HEXUS WAV encoding • HEXUS DivX encoding • Cinebench 2003

For 3D performance we used our HEXUS custom benchmarks:

• Far Cry v1.33 • Quake 4 v1.04 • Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory v1.05

We also ran HDTach version 3.0.1.0 on the system for read and burst speeds over the SATA interface. Further, we tried out its USB2.0 and IEEE1394 connections in conjunction with a 160GB Western Digital IDE drive in an external Akasa enclosure.

Notes

It must be noted that the integrated graphics on the RS482-M is limited in its support for certain features. We had to use slightly lower quality settings in Quake 4 and Splinter Cell than we usually do. Further, in Far Cry the SM2.0 code path was used by the integrated graphics, rather than the SM3.0 path.

It's still possible for us to give you performance comparisons, but please be aware that the integrated vs. X1300 numbers aren't like-for-like directly comparable due to the above discrepencies. In fact, both integrated graphics solutions tested had the same issues, so the integrated solutions can be compared directly with each other.

Benchmarks: ScienceMark, HEXUS.pifast and Cryptography

Memory and single-threaded tests

Kicking off the testing proceedings, we have ScienceMark, Pifast and HEXUS Cryptography.

4.5GB/s from the RS482-M isn't bad. We'll leave commentary on the similar performance against the DDR2 on the RS485M-M to its own review...

It's not surprising to see lower latency for DDR over DDR2. However, increased clock speeds of DDR2 go a long way towards compensating for that now.

The HEXUS.pifast time shows the 2.2GHz CPU calculating pi to 10 million places in about the right time; its performance not being particularly hindered anywhere, we don't think.

Socket 939 or AM2? Doesn't matter for our Cryptography benchmark.

Benchmarks: Encoding, Cinebench and KriiBench

Multi-threaded app. focus

Stop! Encoding time.

The difference between the two boards is astounding - not.

Up the game to DivX and the board in our spotlight today is actually slightly quicker.

The tables turn when benchmarking Cinebench 2003

Performance here is just shy of half what we've seen on high end FX-60 & nForce 500-series chipsets lately, not that we're comparing the RS482-M to them.

Benchmarks: 3D performance and storage subsystems

Gaming and storage evaluation

Our final page of benchmarks looks at 3D performance and closes with a little look at storage.

Now before we start gasping at the very low FPS results here, let's not forget that we're dealing with pretty low-end graphics here. The X300-based integrated graphics doesn't have much hope of providing stellar performance in any recent 3D app. Still, drop even a cheap X1300 into the PEG slot and you have yourself a playable FPS at 1024x768.

The story is exactly the same for Quake 4, although the X1300 performs slightly better in this game with the RS482-M than the RS485M-M.

Splinter Cell slows proceedings down a little, shaving 20FPS off the average for the X1300, compared with our previous two 3D tests. Still in the realm of the playable, though.

We're sick and twisted, though, so we upped the resolution and things dropped below a reasonable FPS average. It's a bit of a shame, given many LCDs use 1280x1024 as a native resolution, but the motherboard isn't to blame for this.

Storage

We checked out the SATA ports on both boards, getting just shy of 60MB/s average read speeds from them both. The burst speed of the RS482M was 111MB/s, while the RS485M-M managed 114.2MB/s. Random access speeds were identical at 13.2ms. We couldn't compare the two boards for FireWire because one of them didn't have it. The RS482-M achieved 38.3MB/s with our Akasa external enclosure, though.

It's USB that we really want to show you...

We're used to USB2.0 being a little slower than FireWire in storage scenarios, so we'd expect something less than 40MB/s, but no less than 20MB/s at an absolute minimum. The SB400 southbridge used with the RS482-M has some USB2.0 performance issues, clearly evident here. ECS's RS485M-M isn't much better, but we'll save our criticism of that for now, seeing as it's quicker.

Overall then, our benchmarks results show the board performs just fine, apart from a 'whoops' in the USB department.

Final thoughts, HEXUS.awards and HEXUS.right2reply

Final thoughts, awards, and right2reply

Extreme performance enthusiasts will have wandered off some time ago now. So we reckon that leaves us with those on a budget, those looking at uATX boards and those who just like to read what we write.

So, to whom it concerns, will the ECS RS482-M do the job? Well, if that job is get you a Socket 939 motherboard for less than fifty quid, yes, it will. If that job is sit in a media centre, then its onboard graphics should be fine unless you're interested in HDTV. The board will take up to an FX-60! CPU, though it's unlikely anyone on a budget would be buying such a processor right now. That said, drop a reasonably powerful Athlon 64 into the board, maybe even a cheap dual-core one, along with a reasonable amount of DDR400 RAM, and it'll crunch away encoding those TV streams and playing back the DivXs without much trouble.

There's nothing on this board that makes you go 'wow', but there are a few nice features, like the TV-Out bracket and, for the most part, a good board layout. The bundle as a whole is perhaps a little stingy. We'd love an extra SATA cable in the package, please, ECS. The

integrated graphics is only useful if you don't want to game with newer titles, but the PEG slots gives opportunity for a potentially hefty upgrade in that department, should the user so wish.

We weren't keen on the southbridge's hideous USB storage performance, so do bear this in mind if it's going to be an issue for you; it won't be for everyone. We could moan about the limited BIOS features too, but nobody's trying to say this is an enthusiast board, so we won't.

All things considered, the ECS RS482-M would serve the budget buyer well. Its support for Socket 939 and PCIe graphics leave room for what is, when you think about it, quite a lot of upgradeability. You could start on integrated graphics and a cheap-o CPU and work your way up to something dual core with some sportier graphics. We like the sound of that. It's small, pretty well-designed, upgradeable and cheap (under £40), so it walks away with our value award.

HEXUS.awards

ECS RS482-M

HEXUS.where2buy

Should this motherboard tickle your fancy, you can buy it for under £40 (excluding delivery) by clicking on this link at pcnextday http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=6279&key=1153854353