NVIDIA GF9300 (ECS GF9300TA) mainboard review - 5 - The ECS Elitegroup GF9300T-A (2)

Here we see the side view of the motherboard. What I do not get is why ECS opted for a 4-pin power connector for the processor. This board can manage all Quad core processors running a 1333 MHz FSB. I really would have liked to see a 2x4 pin connector there, able to supply 2x 75 Watts. CPU wise - Core 2 Family, Pentium D, Pentium 4, Celeron D, Celeron processors - you are go for liftoff.

The board supports four 240-pin unbuffered non-ECC DDR II SDRAM DIMM sockets and up to 8GB of memory can be installed on the board. DDR2-533/667/800 is supported.

In the BIOS memory supports Asynchronous clocking mode between FSB and DIMM.

To your left in orange, USB ports. The mainboard is actually 12 USB devices compliant with USB 2.0 from an embedded USB controller. The MCP7A also supports a P-ATA IDE for one IDE port (up to 2 IDE devices) with UDMA-33, ATA-66/100/133 support from an embedded IDE controller.

Also spot the micro-switches for a quick power-on or reset. I love that stuff. So simple yet so handy.

Under the orange heatsink the new MCP7A chipset is located. Do get some airflow going in your PC, though not too extreme, the passive heatsink will get rather warm. Oh and yes... guys YES. I peeled off that GF9300T-A sticker... and there was nothing underneath it - *sighs* ;)

So there you have it my friends, the GF9300T-A motherboard. I think it's time to warm her up for some tests. What we'll do is simple, we'll insert some snazzy memory and a Core 2 Quad Q6600 processor. We'll look at baseline performance and then overclock the product to 3.0 GHz on all four logical CPU cores and again look at performance.

We manage this pretty simply, we just flick the FSB to 1333 MHz in the BIOS, any modern mainboard can easily cope with this FSB, and your Q6600, when decently cooled, certainly can as well.