TRUE, INTEL'S ONBOARD'. graphics have improved a lot. The only problem is that the competition is improving at a faster pace. We tested the ECS G43T-WM, a micro-ATX form-factor motherboard based on the Intel G43 graphics chipset and found CPU performance to be good, but graphics performance was unimpressive. Our WoridBench 6.0 real world benchmarking suite gave a score of 124, which is in the league of what other motherboards manage when complemented by the same CPU (Intel's Core 2 Quad Q9650), 2GB RAM and Western Digital 300GB Velociraptor hard disk. We ran CPU intensive tasks such as CineBench Rl0 3D rendering - its score of 11,700 is again equal to what a premium motherboard produces with the Q9650 CPU.

Name: Passable Performance From Budget Motherboard.jpg Views: 80 Size: 29.3 KB

The tale takes a turn when you look at graphics. With a 3DMark 2006 score of 1059, it scores low amongst the current crop of onboard graphics chips. The Nvidia Geforce 8200 chip set gave us 1173 points while the latest AMD solution - the 790GX produced 1547 pOints.On the features front too, the ECS G43T-WM is bare¬only two RAM slots, four back panel USB, VGA only video out and no IDE port. There is a Firewire port though and a header for another additional port (and four headers for USB) apart from the standard two pC! and one PCIE xl port. There are 6 SATA ports, so there's room for storage expansion.