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Lenovo ThinkPad SL500 Review

In the past few months, Lenovo has tried to shake up its product availability a bit with the introduction of new lines of notebooks. The SL series is a budget line of laptops aimed at the small business segment. In fact, they're also the cheapest laptops you can buy from Lenovo, barring their new sub-$500 netbook. Corporations can’t cut costs without cutting features, however, and the SL500 is no exception; there are clear cut differences separating the SL500 from the new T500 line of notebooks. Having said that, is the new ThinkPad SL500 a worthwhile investment?

Our SL500 had the following specifications:

• Screen: 15.4" 1680x1050 (WSXGA+) matte finish display
• Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo P8600 (2.4GHz, 1066mhz FSB, 3MB cache)
• Memory: 2GB PC2-5300 RAM (one DIMM)
• Storage: 320GB SATA hard drive (5400RPM)
• Optical Drive: DVD+/-RW
• Wireless: Intel 5100 802.11 a/b/g/n
• Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce 9300M GS 256MB
• Built-in webcam
• Battery: 10.8V, 7.8AH
• Dimensions: 14" x 11.2" x 1.5" (including feet and 9-cell battery)
• Weight: 6lbs, 11.8oz
• Price as configured: $1,393.

Build and Design

The 15.4-inch SL500 is a larger version, naturally, than the 13.3-inch SL300 or 14.1-inch SL400 that we've looked at previously. It follows the same stylings, with a glossy back lid and strip beneath the LCD, while everywhere else is coated in a black matte plastic. Set in the corners of the glossy back are the various Lenovo, ThinkPad and Energy Star logos. The superscript dot above the "i" in the ThinkPad logo is once again replaced with a glowing red LED; it remains constantly lit while fully on and pulses creepily when in sleep mode. Lenovo has chosen to carry their famous color keyboard color scheme to this line as well, with a blue enter key, red trackpoint and striped trackpoint buttons.

One nice thing about the matte finish covering most of the notebook is that it does a great job of hiding fingerprints and other marks. The same cannot be said, however, for the glossy outer covering, and just picking up the computer will leave it marked by skin oils. The speaker grill beneath the display, while attractive, suffers from some of the same issues and shows fingerprints easily.

Lenovo designed the SL500 with a square top half and an inset wedge on the bottom. The wedge-shaped bottom half gives an illusion both of thinness to the laptop as well as making it appear as if the computer floats in midair. By and large the SL series maintains decent build quality, but it's obvious that this is an SL500, not a T500. When you pick it up, it's possible to flex and twist both the screen and base components, but it isn't too serious. The LCD bezel is attached solidly to the base, with the friction of the hinges themselves enough to keep the lid in position.

Screen

The screen on the SL500 is above average, though not exceptional. Horizontal viewing angles are good, with some dimming but little color shift at extremes. Vertical angles were more in line with expectations; at upper viewing angles, the screen begins to fade and lose contrast. Lower viewing angles were better but similarly affected, with the image fading to black right before the notebook was shut.

The display was sufficiently bright for the indoor office environment and even limited outdoor viewing, though direct sunlight would pose a problem. Fortunately, the SL500 comes with a matte display screen, which is much more easily viewable in bright light than traditional glossy screens. As a trade off, images don't have the wet, saturated look that glossy displays present, but the SL500's color reproduction was still more than acceptable.

Speakers and Audio

The speakers are located beneath a black grill above the keyboard. They're a little above average in terms of notebook speaker fidelity, but nothing astonishing. They are lacking in bass, and a little tinny. The speakers are loud enough for casual use, and fine for spoken word playback, like podcasts. The audio controls are located on the left side of the notebook, right beneath the always-lit Lenovo support button. There are discrete buttons for increasing volume, decreasing volume and mute.

Naturally, speakers aren't your only option, as headphones can always be used. To this end, there are audio in and out jacks on the right side of the notebook, towards the front. This is essentially the perfect location for a headphone jack as it's within easy reach and yet out of the way in the unlikely event that you want to hook up an external set of speakers.

Keyboard and Touchpad

Lenovo's notebook keyboards are known for their stability and ease of typing, and the keyboard on this laptop is no exception. The keyboard is very easy to type on, with just the right amount of travel in each key. There has been some questions raised lately about flex involved with Lenovo's new keyboards. All notebook keyboards suffer from flex to a certain extent; this laptop is no exception and features some flex centered around the 'A' key. It is, however, not really noticeable in the course of normal typing and shouldn't be a cause for concern. Just don't expect a rock-solid keyboard. The keyboard is well spaced, but could be bigger, simply because there's a good inch or more of mostly unused space on each side.

The keyboard on the SL500 features the same well-known ThinkPad designs that people either love or hate. My biggest gripe is having the function key located to the left of the left control key instead of to the right, as it throws off known key combinations. This is obviously a matter of personal preference, however, and is in no way a slight on the laptop. In the center of the keyboard sits the famously red touchpoint pointing device. Unlike most laptops, the pointing stick on the SL500 is actually usable as it accurately reflects movement as opposed to casting the cursor wildly about the screen.

The touchpad also works very well, with driver-supported dedicated scroll regions along the bottom and right sides of the pad. I was pleasantly surprised to see that Lenovo had decided to go with the Synaptics touchpad in the SL500 as opposed to the non-Synaptics touchpad used in the other SL-series notebooks. The high quality of the touchpad is evident when you compare it to my Dell Latitude D630 as the touchpad on the D630 suffers from a degree of lag, and light touches simply don't respond. The touchpad on the SL500, is the complete opposite, as even the slightest touch will register and move the cursor with zero delay. The only issue I took with the touchpad is that when making minute gestures, the cursor stuttered and stopped. When I uninstalled the driver, however, the issues ceased, meaning that it's entirely a software, and not hardware, issue, and one that will likely be resolved in future driver updates.

To the right of the touchpad is Lenovo's fingerprint sensor. I didn't do a lot of testing with the fingerprint sensor, but what testing I did reflected positively. Logging into Vista initially took a mere swipe of an index finger, which was recognized on the first try at least nine out of ten times. I didn't test out the included Lenovo security software which lets you use the fingerprint sensor to store passwords for use when logging into various websites, but if it works as well as the initial login does, it'll be very useful indeed.

Benchmarks and Performance

The SL500 is a business notebook, so don't expect excessive 3D/gaming performance. That being said, it held its own very well. Performance was acceptable with smooth desktop rendering. The computer never felt bogged down even with several applications open at one time thanks to the dual-core Intel processor buried within.

There were some peculiarities found when I ran our benchmarks on the SL500. Several times, I ran wPrime's 32M benchmark to completion, only to find that it reported a time sixteen seconds slower than the SL300 review unit, which used the exact same processor. To stave off objections, I always make sure that the notebook is running at maximum performance, with wPrime in multithreaded mode. Sometimes the scores were in-line with what we expect from a P8600 processor, and sometimes not. A similar event occurred with the PCMark benchmark. Since the lower wPrime and higher PCMark scores are reproducible, we are publishing those results, but be advised that (at least in our review unit) there were some oddities surrounding the synthetic benchmark performance. The "real world" performance, however, was flawless.

wPrime is a program that forces the processor to do recursive mathematical calculations, this processor benchmark program is multi-threaded and can use both processor cores at once, it measures the amount of time to run a set amount of calculations.

wPrime comparison results (lower scores means better performance):

Notebook / CPU	wPrime 32M time
Lenovo ThinkPad SL500 (Core 2 Duo P8600 @ 2.4GHz)	32.275s
Lenovo ThinkPad SL300 (Core 2 Duo P8600 @ 2.4GHz)	32.059s
Lenovo ThinkPad SL400 (Core 2 Duo P8400 @ 2.26GHz)	34.628s
HP Pavilion dv5z (Turion X2 Ultra ZM-80 @ 2.1GHz)	39.745s
Dell Inspiron 1525 (Core 2 Duo T7250 @ 2.0GHz)	43.569s
Dell XPS M1530 (Core 2 Duo T7500 @ 2.2GHz)	37.485s
HP Pavilion dv6500z (Turion 64 X2 TL-60 @ 2.0GHz)	40.759s
Sony VAIO NR (Core 2 Duo T5250 @ 1.5GHz)	58.233s
Toshiba Tecra A9 (Core 2 Duo T7500 @ 2.2GHz)	38.343s
Toshiba Tecra M9 (Core 2 Duo T7500 @ 2.2GHz)	37.299s
HP Compaq 6910p (Core 2 Duo T7300 @ 2GHz)	40.965s
Sony VAIO TZ (Core 2 Duo U7600 @ 1.20GHz)	76.240s
Zepto 6024W (Core 2 Duo T7300 @ 2GHz)	42.385s
Lenovo T61 (Core 2 Duo T7500 @ 2.2GHz)	37.705s
Alienware M5750 (Core 2 Duo T7600 @ 2.33GHz)	38.327s
HP Pavilion dv6000z (Turion X2 TL-60 @ 2.0GHz)	38.720s

PCMark05 is a benchmark that measures the overall system performance, so it considers the processor, hard drive, memory and OS as part of the mix.

PCMark05 measures overall notebook performance (higher scores are better):

Notebook	PCMark05 Score
Lenovo ThinkPad SL500 (2.4GHz Intel P8600, Nvidia 9300M GS 256MB)	5,390 PCMarks
Lenovo ThinkPad SL300 (2.4GHz Intel P8600, Nvidia 9300M GS 128MB)	5,554 PCMarks
Lenovo ThinkPad SL400 (2.26GHz Intel P8400, NVIDIA 9300M GS 256MB)	5,173 PCMarks
HP Pavilion dv5z (2.1GHz Turion X2 Ultra ZM-80, ATI Radeon HD 3200)	3,994 PCMarks
Dell Inspiron 1525 (2.0GHz Intel T7250, Intel X3100)	4,149 PCMarks
Dell XPS M1530 (2.20GHz Intel T7500, Nvidia 8600M GT 256MB)	5,412 PCMarks
Dell Inspiron 1520 (2.0GHz Intel T7300, NVIDIA 8600M GT)	4,616 PCMarks
Dell XPS M1330 (2.0GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T7300, NVIDIA GeForce Go 8400M GS)	4,591 PCMarks
Lenovo ThinkPad X61 (2.0GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T7300, Intel X3100)	4,153 PCMarks
Lenovo 3000 V200 (2.0GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T7300, Intel X3100)	3,987 PCMarks
Lenovo T60 Widescreen (2.0GHz Intel T7200, ATI X1400 128MB)	4,189 PCMarks
HP dv6000t (2.16GHz Intel T7400, NVIDA GeForce Go 7400)	4,234 PCMarks
Fujitsu N6410 (1.66GHz Core Duo, ATI X1400)	3,487 PCMarks
Alienware M7700 (AMD Athlon FX-60, Nvidia Go 7800GTX)	5,597 PCMarks
Sony VAIO SZ-110B in Speed Mode (Using Nvidia GeForce Go 7400)	3,637 PCMarks
Asus V6J (1.86GHz Core Duo T2400, Nvidia Go 7400)	3,646 PCMarks

3DMark06 comparison results for graphics performance (higher scores are better):

Notebook	3DMark06 Score
Lenovo ThinkPad SL500 (2.4GHz Intel P8600, Nvidia 9300M GS 256MB)	2,242 3DMarks
Lenovo ThinkPad SL300 (2.4GHz Intel P8600, Nvidia 9300M GS 128MB)	1,695 3DMarks
Lenovo ThinkPad SL400 (2.26GHz Intel P8400, NVIDIA 9300M GS 256MB)	2,211 3DMarks
HP Pavilion dv5z (2.1GHz Turion X2 Ultra ZM-80, ATI Radeon HD 3200)	1,599 3DMarks
Dell Inspiron 1525 (2.0GHz Intel T7250, Intel X3100)	545 3DMarks
HP Pavilion dv6500z (2.0GHz AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-60, NVIDIA 8400m GS)	1,551 3DMarks
Sony VAIO NR (1.5GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T5250, Intel X3100)	504 3DMarks
Dell XPS M1530 (2.20GHz Intel T7500, Nvidia 8600M GT 256MB)	4,332 3DMarks
Dell Inspiron 1520 (2.0GHz Intel T7300, NVIDIA 8600M GT)	2,905 3DMarks
Dell XPS M1330 (2.0GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T7300, NVIDIA GeForce Go 8400M GS 128MB)	1,408 3DMarks
Alienware Area 51 m5550 (2.33GHz Core 2 Duo, nVidia GeForce Go 7600 256MB	2,183 3DMarks
HP dv6000t (2.16 GHz Intel T7400, NVIDA GeForce Go 7400)	827 3DMarks

HDTune storage drive performance results:

Ports and Expansion

Being a 15.4" notebook gives the SL500 the flexibility to offer a number of different ports and expansion technologies, and the SL500 takes advantage of the room. Lenovo also smartly scattered the ports around the sides of the notebook rather that putting them all in the back, so users don't have to turn the notebook around anytime they want to plug something in.

• Four USB 2.0 ports
• FireWire
• HDMI
• VGA
• Audio in/out jacks
• 10/100 Ethernet
• 56.6k modem
• Expresscard/54
• Kensington lock slot
• SD card reader

Front: LED status display, physical wireless connectivity switch

Back: Battery, VGA out, Kensington lock slot, A/C jack

Left: Two USB ports, HDMI, FireWire, SD card reader, heat exhaust

Right: Two USB ports, Ethernet, modem, DVD+/-RW, Expresscard slot, headphone and mic jacks

Heat and Noise

Lenovo did a fantastic job when engineering the SL500's heat dissipation methods. The notebook remained cool to the touch even while running 3DMark. The only place on the entire laptop that gets noticeably warm is the hard drive and graphics card region, which did manage to break the triple-digit barrier. Fortunately, it's in the middle right side of the notebook, meaning that your palms and fingers will stay cool when typing.

As far as noise is conerned, you generally only hear the fans when the notebook is under stress or overly hot. Even then, it's hard to hear them unless the room is pretty quiet. Given most office environments, the noise the SL500 emits will hardly be noticeable.

Battery

Our notebook came with a 9-cell battery, which is an additional $79 but unless your notebook stays plugged in all day, I'd say it's a necessity. For the battery test, I set the screen to sixty percent brightness, wireless networking on, and loading different webpages every so often. The SL500 managed to stay on for 5 hours and 14 minutes. That's generally enough to get most things done, but remember that this was on the extended battery and with very light use. Given that the extended battery sticks less than an inch out of the back of the notebook, I definitely recommend upgrading to the 9-cell battery.

Conclusion

Lenovo has managed to put together a business notebook computer for the budget conscious market. They've cut costs while remaining true to the ThinkPad's image as a solid computer built to take the abuse today's executives dish out. While there are notable difference in construction between the SL500 and the T500, there are also notable differences in price, as the SL500 has a base price of around $500 less than its T-series counterpart. This can add up to a monumentous cost savings when you consider that a company might deploy several hundred laptops for employees.

At the end of the day, the SL500 is a worthy addition to the ThinkPad line, as it allows consumers to sacrifice a certain degree of build quality while saving enough money to almost buy a second computer. Small businesses looking to expand their productivity while keeping costs down would do well to look at the ThinkPad SL500 as a mobile solution.

Pros:

• Lots of ports, including FireWire and HDMI
• Physical wireless connectivity switch for easy compliance with flight regulations
• Fantastic heat dissipation
• Modern business design
• ThinkPad quality without ThinkPad prices!

Cons:

• Wedge design makes accessing some ports difficult
• Glossy lid is a fingerprint magnet
• Wasted space that could have been used for full-sized arrow keys
• Excellent TouchPad but buggy TouchPad drivers

Core 2 Extreme QX9770 Quad-Core review

Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9770 Quad-Core Processor Preview
Intel's new 45nm Yorkfield 3.2 GHz tested and agonized

It was merely a week or three ago when we published our first Penryn based processor review here at Guru3D.com.

Yet a little while ago we received a phone call from Intel asking if we wanted to test an even faster Penryn CPU. Well, you know me .. when it comes to enthusiast products I'm like a bitch in heat, bring it on. In that previous article we already have you a good overview of the to be released Penryn products on Q1 of the next year. One of the products in that extensive line of 45nm products, actually the one on top, is the Core 2 Extreme QX9770 Quad core processor. The cream of the crop, top notch product.

It's quite silly to observe that AMD has such a hard time releasing a quad core Phenom CPU that performs close to the most budget level Q6600 Intel processor, while Intel already sent us the new QX9770 which will be released next year.

Now, this article took us longer than expected to make. See, we tested this CPU on a platform that does not support this 1600 MHz FSB based product while it most certainly should have supported it. We initially tested on an NVIDIA nForce 680i. Now trust me when I say that the 680i does not support this Penryn processor. We had to tweak so much in the P31 BIOS that it likely was dangerous for the CPU. We did get it running, but let me state this: please do not try to use the 680i and this processor at home, NV is not supporting it at all. Not even officially on it's new 780i mainboard. On the next page I'll shed some light on it.

This week ASUS was able to provide us with an Intel X38 chipset based mainboard with full support for this 1600 MHz FSB based CPU and OCZ did their part by supplying some DDR3 memory as well. For now let's dive into our preliminary findings. Next page please.

Gents & ladies, meet the most expensive Quad Core consumer processor that money can buy ... it's demonic, devilish .. at one point I even called it Lucifer.

Demonic red, symbolic for how hot this processor actually is...

AMD Phenom X4 9850 Black Edition review

The Phenom X4 9850 Black Edition

Last years introduction of the Phenom 9500, 9600 and 9700 were, as you guys know, not meticulously successful. AMD released an, in theory, great architecture. It arrived really late on the market, yet more importantly it had a vicious bug which we now all know as the TBL erratum. These two facts really damaged any marketing spin that AMD could give a perfectly interesting micro-architecture, as by patching out that bug, they where loosing performance greatly, yet was needed for stability. That however was the B2 core revision of the processor.

It's now April 2008 and AMD released their Phenom X4 50-series processors, with an all new fixed B3 core, hopefully they can now leave the past behind them and move forward with a processor that can actually start competing with the competition.

So get that in your brain real tight: The biggest deficit of that B2 revision processor, the deletion of the TLB erratums, is now fixed in the B3 edition.

Today we'll look at the new B3 revision processor and continue where we left of with our newest Phenom review.

To do that we need to chat a little about the architecture underneath that heat spreader. The Phenom is based on what is called the 'Barcelona' architecture. The silicon has four native independent cores merged together into one die; opposed to Intel who merges two dual-core chips together in one die. AMD claims due to the independent cores the technology can be be faster than Intel's solution in multi-threaded applications, their technology should be more efficient.

Let's have a quick architectural overview, and then dive into what it's all about .. performance benchmarks.

AMD Phenom X3 8750 review

Tri-core computing with AMD's Phenom X3 8750, it's the Core Truth.

With the incremental increase in multi-core computing AMD last year surprised pretty much anybody in the world when information leaked regarding a roadmap showing CPUs with not 1, 2 or 4 cores on them .. no three cores.

In Latin we'd call this 'Triplex Uniter' and to date it surely has been one of the most gossiped about processors.

Make no mistake, the triple core processor is in fact a quad-core Phenom CPU with one core disabled, something AMD obviously will never admit. See, AMD made a bit of a mistake in their released X3 technical specs; it mentions the X3 processor with the exact same transistor count as the X4 Phenoms, so now we know for a fact that the X3 physically is an X4 with one core disabled.

Whether this is a either a 100% functional Phenom X4 processor, or somewhat bad yields Phenom processors with one core disabled because it's defective remains a mystery. And even so, there's nothing wrong with that, why write off a processor that can work better than a dual-core processor, yet didn't make it as a quad-core processor ?

These new x86-based desktop X3 processors will complement AMD's Phenom multi-core processors, which the company introduced in May 2007, with the new B3 revision released just weeks ago.

Utilizing the Direct Connect Architecture, the new triple-core Phenom features an integrated memory controller and a shared L3 cache. Just like the quad-core Phenom, this mainstream-market CPU also supports HyperTransport 3.0 and up to 16GB/sec of high bandwidth I/O as well as Cool‘n’Quiet 2.0 technology that enables independent frequency adjustments to each processor core, and the HyperTransport bus and memory controller.

With three cores enabled, it also makes sense that the price is somewhat lower, perhaps even up-to 25%, and let's be honest here .. that might be a really nice deal -- though three cores sounds pretty odd for a home desktop processor, doesn’t it?

So then, recently AMD released their Phenom X4 50-series processors, with an all new fixed B3 core, with which they can now leave the past behind them and move forward with processors that can actually start competing with the competition. Today we'll look at a B3 based Phenom X3 xx50-series processor, the Phenom X3 8750.

Let's have a quick architectural overview, and then dive into what it's all about .. performance benchmarks.

CPU scaling in games with quad-core processors

The core truth ...

Each year the topic of CPU scaling comes to mind in relation to gaming. Especially when we see new processors enter the market time after time I ask myself again; how much influence do these new model processors actually have? There have been some dramatic changes over the past couple of years though as processor manufacturers have hit a hard brick wall. That wall being the incremental increase of the clock frequency, or moreover ... the lack of it. Somehow everything stops at 3200 MHz in the processor R&D segment and for years now the fastest clocked processors never have exceeded that magic number. Surely we overclock much higher and new records have been set at 4 and with LN2 sub-zero temperature cooling reaching 5 GHz, for us 'regular' consumers we stick at that 3.2 GHz frequency border.

Apparently it's difficult to get the hundreds of millions transistors clocked higher. Therefore in an attempt to divert that fundamental issue, a couple of years ago we saw the introduction of multi-core processors. See, it's way more easy to shrink the die-size of a processor than to get it faster clocked. Shrinking die's makes more room for other stuff. Moore's Law ceased to exist and became Moores laws (e.g. multiple). Multi-threaded computing was introduced. The problem to date however is simple .. right down to the source all software was never developed with multiple processor cores in mind, and though we see some applications being supported better, the one type of application you guys like the most, games, are very much hindered by this fact. 80% of the games currently available will only use one logical CPU core at best, perhaps add another 18% that finally does support two cores, and the remaining 2% uses multiple cores, ideally. These numbers do change when you look at the games released over the past 12 months though.

None-the-less the past year has been an interesting one, we've seen a strong development in gaming with multi-core CPU's, AMD released the B3 stepping of its Phenom quad-core and triple core processors while Intel is steadily shifting towards it's Penryn based 45nm processors. Two, three, four even 8 logical processor cores is now a viable option in the consumer market. Prices for an entry level quad core processor hover at 200-300 USD in the mainstream segment. Everybody is jumping the multi-core bandwagon, but guys ... quite honestly, the most value is still to be found in the mid-range dual-core processors.

We figured it's be a good idea to have a look at the performance of your average Core 2 Duo dual-core processor, and then take a handful of quad-core processors, throw them at a high-end specced graphics card and see what processor and platform really will:

a) bring the most value
b) be the fastest

We'll test the following processors:

• AMD Athlon X2 4850E
• AMD Phenom X3 8750
• AMD Phenom X4 9450
• AMD Phenom X4 9850
• Intel Core 2 Duo E8400
• Intel Core 2 Duo X6800 Extreme
• Intel Core 2 Quad Q6850
• Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600
• Intel Core 2 Quad Q9450
• Intel Core 2 Quad QX9770

So from top to bottom that's a decent set of processors. Now we'll take 2 GB of memory and lock it at 1066 MHz and equal timings on both the AMD and Intel platform. Take Windows Vista 32-bit with SP1 installed, pop in a GeForce 8800 Ultra and use the following applications:

• World in Conflict
• Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2
• S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Shadow of Chernobyl
• F.E.A.R.
• Quake Wars: Enemy territory
• Call of Duty 4
• Crysis
• 3DMark Vantage

The results ... well you'll find them to be quite interesting. This article is not so much a shootout of graphics cards. No, to the contrary it has been made with one thing in mind: To observe the effect of the faster multi-core processors on a modern graphics card. We'll dive immediately into the benchmarks. First up the test systems used and then we'll start off with contestant number one.

ECS X48T-A review mainboard

Introduction

Today another ECS review, and yes .. again a mainboard from their popular Black series products, which are well received here at Guru3D.com.

ECS a while ago started this new series in their product line-up of mainboard, The "Black Series" is targeted slightly more at you guys, the Guru3D readers; feature packed mainboards, nice design, black PCB and decent overclocking options. All that with an affordable price tag in mind. And yes, even though today's mainboard is based on the high-end and really expensive X48 chipset, we'll show you that it's again affordable. See typically an X48 chipset based mainboard will start at roughly 250 USD. The two chips the mainboard manufacturer has to purchase from Intel total up towards 90 USD alone. I'll spill the beans already for today, you can pickup this product for 199 USD. And it even looks superb.

Pretty high-end gear for sure as Intel's X48 chipset brings support for the all new 1600 MHz FSB processors, two 16x PCI-E 2.0 slots, which you can use for ATI CrossFire, two ATI graphics cards and heaps of nice features. What's so new about X48 opposed to the previous X38 you might ask .. well the only difference between the X48 and the X38 chipsets is the official support for 400MHz FSB (1,600MHz effective) CPUs. And let me restate 'official' there as the X38 mainboards can do that FSB perfectly well if you get the latest BIOS.

But hey ... this is where we land at the premise of ECS, they make lovely affordable mainboards, the question is .. can an OEM manufacturer live up to that reputation with a high-end product ?

Today we test their ECS X48T-A (revision 1.0) mainboard, based on that Intel X48 chipset which is at the root of making stuff happen, with a nice feature set.

But before we startup the actual review, let's first have a peek at it, as it certainly is a feast for the eyes with the black colored theme and the nice passively cooled hot-spots. You ready? ... open your eyes then.