Today we are checking out a brand new Intel P45 based motherboard from ECS designed to deliver high-end performance to the masses. While this budget board costs roughly $100 US, it does have one interesting surprise in store for bargain shoppers that it not likely to impress. Since its arrival DDR3 memory has done little to impress, offering mediocre performance gains at ridiculous price premiums. So does it have any place on a budget ECS motherboard?
With more than half a dozen Intel Core 2 Duo processors priced well below $200 US, building a relatively powerful computer for next to nothing has become child’s play. Take the Core 2 Duo E7200 which we recently featured in our “Building The Ultimate Budget Gaming PC” article. This 2.53GHz dual-core processor features a 3MB L2 cache and has enough guts to go head to head with pretty much anything, at least for gaming.
Priced at just $120 US the E7200 really helps keep building costs down and in the past this kind of money would be lucky to land you a flaccid Celeron type processor. Even the big guns, such as the E8500 clocked at 3.16GHz, costs less than $200 US, which is amazing given that this is currently Intel’s most potent dual-core processor. Continue reading