Wednsesday April 21, 1999

Introduction

The ECS P5VP-A+ is another of the numerous Super7 motherboards based on the Via MVP3 chispet. The MVP3 chipset is composed of two components where the first one is the VT82C598MVP chip while the next one is the VT82C586B chip. The main feature of this motherboard is that the clock frequency and therefore the processor operating frequency, are determined by a set of jumpers. This may look a little oldy but it sure is pretty efficient for as long as the user is thorough and careful when setting the jumpers. Even if this motherboard is not benefitting of any specific particularities, it is a very interesting product offering good performance and high stability. Let's have a closer look with all the details about this motherboard in the following review we will do of it.

The features

The expansion possibilities supported by the P5VP-A+ are including 4 PCI slots, 2 ISA slots, 1AGP port and 3 memory banks.

The P5VP-A+ clock frequencies can be selected within a choice of frequencies ranging from 66Mhz to 124Mhz, including: 66Mhz, 75Mhz, 83Mhz, 95Mhz, 100Mhz, 112Mhz and 124Mhz. The clock multipliers can be selected from 1,5X to 4,5X in steps of ,5X. The processor core voltage can be varied is steps of 0,1vdc from 2,2vdc to 3,5vdc.

In regard of this, in my opinion, the P5VP-A+ has a litle lack of versatility. As a fact, a clock multiplier not able to go over 4.5X looks a bit stiff to me. Furthermore, some additional system bus frequencies such as 105Mhz, 108Mhz, 115Mhz, 120Mhz and more specifically 133Mhz would have not being considered as a luxury and would certainly have been highly appreciated.

Below, is a picture of the ECS P5VP-A+ motherboard:

Installation

The installation of this motherboard is really requiring lots of care and thoroughness to make sure that every jumpers are set at the right place. There are 12 jumpers to set and the misplacement of any of them might signify an unusable or unbootable system. I am really wondering what were thinking ECS engineers when they designed this motherboard at an era where the Jumperless motherboards are King of the hill.... Anyway, everyone should be able to correctly set all these jumpers as long as they take their time and double check everything before to turn on the power. However, you will not be able to rely on the P5VP-A+ users manual for everything as there are no indication about the core voltage required for the processors supported by the motherboard included in this manual. This is in my opinion an unforgivable oversight from ECS and I highly wish that this mistake will soon be corrected in the next revision of the P5VP-A+ users manual. So, for now, you will have to find by yourself what is the required core voltage of the processor you wish to use before to set the jumpers accordingly.

The Software Bundle

The software bundle included with this motherboard is not bad but the design of the CD containing them is really not a success. As fa fact, all the Autorun is doing is to bring the CD splash screen to you. Once the splash screen is displayed, as soon as you click on the menu, you're brought to a window looking pretty similar to the Windows Explorer and you're facing a bunch of motherboard numbers with no further help. The softwares and utilities included are: the Via Bus master drivers, the Via AGP port drivers, the Via USB bus and ACPI drivers, the Via IRQ routing drivers, a system health monitor, a "FlashBIOS" utility, directX5 (sic...), the Intel LCDM application and PC-Sillin an antivirus.

Continue on next page with The performance tests results