Board Layout
The board features a nice color mix with its black PCB, and port coloring that fits well within the scheme.
Click to Enlarge
The board makes use of somewhat smallish passive chipset heatsinks. The P45 chipset tends to run a little warm, and the inclusion of at least some larger passive heatsinks would have been a welcome addition here.
Nothing out of the ordinary is located on the back of the PCB.
The CPU socket area is pretty clean and should not inhibit the installation of most large coolers. One thing of note, is the board on makes use of a four pin vs. 8 pin CPU power connector. Another strange downgrade choice if you will, considering this is their “Black Series” high-end product line.
The board features an ICH10R Southbridge that supports RAID5 on all six of its SATA 3 Gb/s ports. An additional JMicron JMB361 controller provides one eSATA port and one UltraATA/133 IDE port. Three USB 2.0 headers, and onboard power and reset switches, are located in this area as well.
The ECS P45T-A supports 4 x DDR2 memory modules, and a memory capacity up to 16 gigs. The 24-pin power connection is also located on this top right corner. I find this placement works well, as it makes it easy to route the power cable away from other board components.
The ECS makes use of a four phase power regulation design. Enough to power any CPU that it lists support for. However, most mid-high level P45 motherboards offer six phase and greater power regulation.
The ECS P45T-A has you well covered in the expansion slot area, with 2 x PCI Express x16 slots(when using two VGA cards, the bandwidth is @8 bandwidth), 2 x PCI Express x1 slots and 2 x PCI slots. Located below those are the IDE and Floppy ports.
The rear panel I/O ports are also somewhat sparse by today’s standards, but feature 1 x PS/2 keyboard & PS/2 mouse connectors, 6 x USB 2.0 ports, 1 x RJ45 LAN connector, Realtek (ALC883) 7.1 Channel High Definition Audio ports, 1 x Serial port (COM1) and 1 x External SATA connector.
