ECS P5SS-Me Super 7 motherboard
Tuesday, May 04, 1999
Introduction
The ECS P5SS-Me Super 7 motherboard is a Micro ATX motherboard including both an onboard AudioPCI soundcard and an AGP 3D Video graphic card. Therefore, even if the expansion possibilities are a bit limited with only 3 PCI slots and 1 ISA slot, the onboard audio and video cards are coming into help to lessen this effect. The ECS P5SS-Me is based on the Sis5595 chipset and is one of the very rare motherboard to support Ultra Dma 66 at this moment. The configuration of this motherboard is accomplished by jumpers and is allowing for a very wide variety of processors. Let's see together how is performing this motherboard and all it has to offer.
The Features
As said in the introduction, the ECS P5SS-Me Super 7 motherboard has a built in Audio PCI soundcard. This soundcard is based on the Elite CMI8338 audio Chipset. The Aureal A3D sound effects are supported by the soundcard as well as Microsot's Directsound 3D and full Sound Blatser 16 -bit compatibility. There is also a digital 24-bit SPDIF input/output as well as standards CDROM/DVD inputs. A midi/game port is also available. The AGP graphic card can support screen resolution of up to 1600 X 1200 and uses a shared memory architecture which be set to use 2Mb ,4Mb, or 8Mb of the system main memory. The system health monitoring is supported by the Winbond W8378ID chip.
The P5SS-Me+ clock frequency can be selected from a choice of frequencies ranging from 66Mhz to 133.3Mhz including: 66Mhz, 75Mhz, 83.3Mhz 95Mhz, 100Mhz, 112Mhz, 124Mhz and 133.3Mhz. The clock multipliers can be selected from a choice ranging from 5.5X to 5.5X in steps of .5X. The processor voltage core can be adjusted from 2.1 to 3.5 vdc.
The expansion slots included are 1 ISA slot, 3 PCI slots and 2 DIMMs memory banks but unfortunately no AGP port connector is present. The L2 cache memory size is 1024Kb.
Below, we have a picture of the ECS P5SS-Me Super 7 motherboard and a good view on its components layout.
Note: Click here to read the detailed specifications of this motherboard.
Installation
The installation of this motherboard is pretty straight forward and as a fact it is similar in all aspects to any other motherboards configured by jumpers.
Features
Features such as: Wake up on LAN, PS2 mouse and keyboard connectors, Keyboard power-on, Wake up on modem ring and system health monitoring are all supported.
The Software Bundle
The software bundle included with the ECS P5SS-Me includes: a system health monitor, a "FlashBIOS" utility, directX5 (sic...), the Intel LCDM application and PC-Sillin an antivirus..
Remarks
Some particularities of this motherboard surprised me a little and I would like to share my discoveries with you. The first thing I have been surprised by is the fact that there apparently is no way to adjust the screen refresh rate when using the integrated graphic card, at least with the drivers I have been using. The next thing is the fact that there are no AGP port connector to allow the use of an add in AGP graphic card. Bear in mind that AGP is by nature a one port one device feature. Thus, It is impossible to have an AGP port connector while there already is a built-in AGP graphic card. Therefore, if you choose to use your own graphic card, you will have to make sure to get a PCI graphic card. By the way, I found no jumpers to disable the onboard graphic and this could probably be pretty detrimental to the overall performance of the system. Remember that if you choose to use your own add in PCI graphic card that the processor will have to support simultaneously two graphic card and this is far from an ideal situation. Finally, the accessories and indicators connectors do not allow the use of a 3 pins Green led indicator as found on many computer casing and therefore, I couldn't get my Green Led connected as it is using a 3 pins connector.
Continue on next page with The performance tests results
ECS P5SS-Me Super 7 motherboard Specifications
| Form Factor | Micro ATX | Features |
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| CPU Support | Pentium with MMX,Cyrix/IBM 6x86,Cyrix/IBM 6x86 M II,AMD K5/K6/K6-2, | The P5SS-Me mainboard is a micro ATX board measuring 243.8 mm by 198.2 mm and using a 4-layer printed circuit board. This is a socket-7 board which supports a wide range of Pentium and Pentium-compatible processors which adhere to the socket-7 pinout. The P5SS-Me is supplied with an AGP 3D-graphics controller and a 3D-audio controller pre-installed on the motherboard. The high level of integration contributes to the stability of the system, and means that the board is ready to use with the addition of just a socket-7 CPU and a DIMM memory module. This is an economic platform which provides entry-level through to business-class Pentium performance for minimum cost. |
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| Chipset | SiS5595/SiS530 |
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| Bios Vendor | Award |
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| L2 Cache | PBSRAM | 1MB(2MB option) |
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| Memory | DIMM | 2 |
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| SIMM | 0 |
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| Max. Memory | 1GB |
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| Support* | N |
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| V G A | Chip | Embedded in SiS530 | IO Interface |
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| Memory | Shared Memory |
- 1 - EPP/ECP mode parallel port
- 2 - 16550 high speed serial I/O ports
- Dual PCI IDE ports support up to 4 HDDs (PIO mode 4, DMA Mode 2; Ultra DMA 33/66)
- Supports 360K~2.88M Byte or 3Mode FDDs
- PS/2 Keyboard and PS/2 Mouse Adapter
- ATX power supply connector
- Two sets of USB connector
- Other ports
- IrDA /ASKIR Header
- One fast IR Header(Optional)
- Green indicator LED Connector
- CPU Fan Power headers
- Internal Modem Ring Wake Up & LAN card wake up functions
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| Max. Memory | N/A |
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| Audio | Chip | Elite PCI Audio CMI8338 |
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| Interface | PCI |
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| Slots | ISA | 1 |
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| PCI | 3 |
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| ISA/PCI Shared | 1 |
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| EISA | 0 |
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| Power Connector | ATX |
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| RTC & Battery | Coin Type Li3V
SiS5595 included 256 bytes CMOS SRAM |
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| Regulator | Switching |
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| AGP | Integrated |
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