This combo includes a tray processor with the Brisbane core, part number ADO4200IAA5DO. I prefer the 4400+ because the memory is underclocked less (due to a ratio issue I don't have time to explain), but this is a great price for a 4200+ combo.
I haven't had a chance to fully test a GEFORCE6100PM-M2, but I think I'm going to like it a lot, especially considering the price I pay for it when I buy a combo like this. I like ECS products in general. It's true that they don't always use the highest quality components (very few manufacturers do so all the time, or without charging an arm and a leg), but their manufacturing quality is excellent. The traces are clean, the solder points are nearly perfect, and their reliability is solid.
Out of 200+ samples, I've only seen two ECS motherboards that had any real problems. Compared to the number of Asus, Gigabyte, and Soyo products I've had to return, our success rate with ECS products is phenomenal. In one case, the parallel port didn't work. (It was detected by the BIOS and the OS, so it must have been a physical problem.) In the other case, the automatic fan control could not be enabled in the BIOS (the option was visible but greyed out). Every other problem that our customers have reported has been the result of ignorance and/or user error.
- One customer damaged a motherboard because the PS/2 mouse he plugged into it had bent pins, which caused a short and caused a couple of components to burn up. He said his keyboard wouldn't work. (It was on a related circuit.)
- One customer glued the LGA775 CPU cooler to the motherboard with SuperGlue and got glue all over the back of the motherboard. When he tried to clean it off, he broke several traces. He told us he couldn't get the motherboard to work.
- One customer said a "technician" had told him that the motherboard was "dead". (The "technician" actually does software tech support.) He claimed that the CPU was originally not inserted all the way, which was impossible because the CPU cooler was mounted correctly when we shipped it to him. More likely, he pulled the CPU out of the socket when he removed the CPU cooler because the thermal compound was stuck to it. When I tested the motherboard, I found absolutely nothing wrong with it. There's no telling what the customer was doing wrong, since there are so many possibilities.
- One customer returned a computer to us because the onboard video was disabled in the BIOS, and the display wouldn't work when she removed the video card.
- One customer returned a computer to us that a "technician" had worked on. Someone had replaced the memory with a dead stick of memory (and kept the one we had installed) and replaced the floppy drive with a dead floppy drive. The customer also complained that the USB ports on the front of the computer case didn't work, which was understandable since they were unplugged. The customer demanded his money back from us.
- Several customers plugged in their floppy drive power connectors the wrong way, so their computers wouldn't boot. (The power supply protection circuitry was doing its job.) They blamed the motherboards and thought they were "dead".
- One customer mounted the CPU cooler the wrong way on a Socket 462 motherboard, preventing it from making contact with the CPU, so the CPU overheated and died. (There's a notch in that type of heatsink, and it must be oriented the right way.)
- A couple of customers reported data corruption problems when they tried to use DDR2 memory that required at least 2.1 Volts. (Standard DDR2 memory uses 1.8 Volts.) In one case, the customer didn't notice the setting in the BIOS that permits voltage increases up to 0.3 Volts on that particular motherboard.
- Several people reported problems that were really the result of software or OS problems that had nothing to do with the motherboard. For example, back in 1995, one customer reported that Lotus couldn't use all of the system memory in the computer we had sold him, so the memory must be bad. (I thought that was a strange way to diagnose a hardware problem myself.) The problem was that he had copied the program from another computer (instead of installing it properly with original media) and it was previously configured to use less than the total amount of system memory. In other words, it was actually doing what it was supposed to do. And of course, other people blamed their problems on the hardware we had sold them when their computers were infected with viruses, trojans, worms, etc.
- A couple of customers were outraged because they couldn't get better overclocking results. One of them said the motherboard "sucks" and the other one said it was "the most horrible piece of crap he had ever seen".
I'll let you draw your own conclusions about the nature of ECS motherboards. By the way, ECS manufactures motherboards for other companies such as Abit, so I guess you need to be wary of their products, as well.
On the other hand, perhaps you would feel better about using an ECS motherboard if you could see how one is made. Here are a couple of articles you might enjoy:
http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=1288
http://www.bit-tech.net/bits/2...n_zhen_factory_tours/1
This quote from the Hexus article is very interesting:
"Did you know that ECS make more mainboards than anyone else? Thought ASUS was the biggest mainboard vendor on the planet? Well they are, but only in terms of sales of their own branded boards. If you were to add up all the sales of all the boards ECS make for themselves and for their customers, ASUS would look a wee bit weak in comparison. The chances are that you've sat down at a PC with an ECS-produced mainboard in it more than once in your life, whether you realise it or not."
In other words, the non-ECS-branded motherboard you're using might be crap and you just don't know it.