ECS 945G-M3 and C19-A SLI Motherboards

ECS C19-A SLI: The Board Have a Closer Look

The C19-A SLI's PCB is a deep purple, a common color for ECS boards. The board features a typical layout. The northbridge, which is cooled by a heatsink and fan, is in between the CPU socket and expansion slots while the southbridge is between the expansion slots and the SATA connectors. ECS did a good job of not crowding too many areas on the board. The power connectors are really close to connectors and/or capacitors, but that's easy to get over.

The C19-A SLI sports four DIMM slots which support 667MHz DDR2. Near the memory slots, you can see the main power connector, the floppy connector and one of the IDE connectors. You might also notice that longer PCI Express x16 video cards would have to be removed in order to install/uninstall memory, so that you could fully disengage the DIMM slot clips. The southbridge is passively and silently cooled by a small heatsink. Near the southbridge, you can find the rest of this board's storage options: four SATA 3Gb/s connectors and the second IDE connector.

The CPU socket seems to have enough clearance for most large coolers. One of the PCI Express x16 slots is orange while the other is blue. When in SLI mode, these slots function as x8 slots. With two video cards installed, you won't be able to use the PCI Express x1 slot in between the two x16 slots, but the one to the left of the orange x16 slot would still be available. The C19-A SLI also sports three PCI slots, one of which probably couldn't be used if you decide to run two video cards in SLI.

We were pleasantly surprised by the rear panel I/O in regards to audio outputs. In addition to the six analog ports that support 8-channel audio, this board includes two digital S/PDIF out connectors (one optical and one coaxial). In addition to the audio ports, you can see the following connectors: PS/2 keyboard, PS/2 mouse, 4 USB 2.0, 1 serial and 1 RJ45.