ECS PF22 Extreme Review - PAGE 2

The Bundle

The PF22 Extreme's bundle falls into mid-field as far as bundles are concerned. By no means am I under whelmed -- I've probably just been spoiled by everything-and-the-kitchen-sink bundles from other motherboards. The bundle here contains everything you'll need to make use of the board.

An inventory of what you see above:

• 1x application CD and 1x driver CD (ours was a pre-final CD-R burn)
• 1x rear USB/Firewire bracket (1 Firewire + 2 USB 2.0)
• 1x rear parallel port bracket
• 1x rear SATA port bracket
• 4x SATA cables
• 2x IDE cables (80-conductor + 40-conductor), 1x floppy cable
• 1x SATA power cable (2 plugs)
• 1x 6-foot CAT5e Ethernet cable
• 1x 3.5" bay port option (for moving the rear USB/Firewire to the front)
• 1x rear port chassis cover
• 1x TopHat flash chip

That last item should be particularly interesting to enthusiasts. We like to update to the latest and greatest of everything, even when it's not broken -- that includes BIOSes. There's always a chance that you can make a mistake, or your computer crashes, or the power goes out during a BIOS flash, and your motherboard will be rendered useless. That's where Elitegroup's "TopHat BIOS" comes in.

Reviving a PF22 with a dead BIOS is as simple as slapping on the TopHat chip over top of the existing BIOS chip, and then turning on the system. The BIOS stored in the secondary TopHat takes over, allowing you to boot your system. At that point you remove the TopHat chip and re-flash the permanent on-board chip with a good BIOS. Overall, this is a very neat little feature, and I would dare to say better than Gigabyte's DualBIOS.

The Board

The Elitegroup PF22 Extreme follows the same pleasant aesthetics that we saw with the KN1 and KN1 SLI Extreme. The various connectors and slots are very vividly coloured, while the entire board takes on a clean, vaguely-sparkly purple sheen.

At first glance, most observers would say that the PF22 appears lacking in one way or another. There seems to be a sizeable amount of PCB that has gone unused. Upon further inspection, you realize that this is merely an illusion due to there being no visible traces and silk-screened writing. Compare this to a DFI LanParty motherboard, and it almost looks like a ghost town. In any case, I much prefer this look, as it is easier on the eyes, and makes the hunt for connectors that much less painful.

Unfortunately, I have to say that I've seen better board layouts, both from Elitegroup and other manufacturers. For starters, the DIMM slots are obstructed by longer video cards -- and let's face it, you can't exactly find a short PCI-Express card. This obstruction of arguably useful things continues on to the PCI-Express x1 slot. With a dual-slot video card installed in the first PCI-Express x16 slot, the teeny-tiny x1 slot becomes unusable. Since this motherboard is advertised as being CrossFire-capable, then it's safe to assume that a CrossFire "master" card will be installed -- and unless that has changed recently, all the master cards I've seen have been dual-slot solutions.

I have two more gripes, and they are related to the placement of the front-panel LED/button headers and SATA ports. This is honestly the first time that I have seen a motherboard where the LED/button headers for the front case panel were not at the edge of the board. On the PF22 Extreme, the headers are located behind the primary (green) IDE connector. Not only does this make things very painful to work with if you have the motherboard installed in a case, and have an IDE device connected, but it's extremely difficult to find if don't know where to look and have an IDE cable with a paper grip on the end plugged in.

The placement of the SATA ports is the most minor of my gripes, but it's worth a mention anyway. To me, it would have made much more sense to have these ports going vertically (when looking at the motherboard when it is installed in an up-right case), rather than horizontally. Due to there being three ports side-by-side, they come awfully close to two of the PCI slots available on the PF22. With a medium to long-length PCI card installed in the first slot, one or two of those SATA ports could become completely useless. With the same card installed in the second PCI slot down, the second set of one or two ports becomes hard to deal with.

In any case, while there is nothing on the PF22 that makes me scream in terror, I do believe that there could have been a few better design decisions made. My first impressions are that this is physically not the best board for tinkerers and enthusiasts. Maybe the BIOS has a few surprises in store that will make us forget all about DIMM slots and SATA ports? Let's find out.