ECS readies Grantsdale board that breaks every Intel rule

ECS IS SHOWING an interesting hybrid PCI Express motherboard in Taiwan. The board, based around Intel's Grantsdale chips and is dubbed the 915P-A. It sports an AGP slot alongside the swanky new PCI Express graphics slot. It also has memory slots for either DDR or DDR2 memory sticks.

PCI Express is the new-style bus users are expected to hop aboard in order to deliver pixels by the gazillion.

But ECS has chosen to offer a sort of half-way house between the new technologies and the old, by plumbing a standard AGP slot in to the board alongside the swanky new PCI Express slot.

An engineer put the case for the arrangement, questioning the logic of sticking a $500 graphics card into a $100 board powered by a $100 processor.

While the design has been derided as impractical or even impossible by PCI Express evangelists, our engineer showed us figures to demonstrate that the impact on the performance of the AGP slot was negligible.

In tests, ECS found that while Direct X8 performance may be impacted by around 20 per cent on higher end graphics cards, the performance hit in DirectX 9 games is around five per cent or less.

At these levels, the sacrificed AGP performance represented "no real compromise,"” compared to the potential cost saving to the customer, our new friend said.

The board also sports four memory slots, two of the DDR variety and two DDR2, though the memory types cannot, of course, be mixed.

The boards go into production this week, although Intel will not officially launch its Grantsdale chipset until June 21st. µ