The L4S8A comes with all the amenities you'd expect from a modern board: support for 400MHz and 533MHz FSB processors, 8X AGP (bandwidth of 2.1GB/sec), and support for DDR333 DDR-SDRAM and ATA133 drives.

ECS didn't decide to stop at the basics though. They've also included an integrated Serial ATA RAID 0 or1 card, USB 2.0 ports, a Realtek RTL8100B network card, and an obligatory six-channel sound-card -- the C-Media 9739A.

Note that the L4S8A version will not be available is the US because only the L4S8B rendition without the Serial SATA RAID contrôller will be available.

Now, let's see what this baby's got, shall we?

Audio

The ECS L4S8A's audio circuitry is based around a C-Media CMI 9739A sound-chip. Here are its principal characteristics:

Configuration

The ECS L4S8A's design is Jumperless in nature, which means users do not need to play with jumpers to get their system up and running. To make any adjustments to system parameters, one need only drop into the BIOS.


The "Frequency/Voltage Control" menu, for instance, holds the "Overclocking Function" sub-menu, which includes the option the set the FSB frequency to between 133MHz and 200MHz in 1MHz increments, or to allow the setting to be determined automatically.

The Vcore and AGP voltages can also be adjusted to operate at any of the settings indicated in the table above.

Next, there is an option to set the CPU/AGP ratio in order to control the memory bus frequency. Choices include: 1:1, 1:2, 2:1, 2:3, 3:2, 3:4, 3:5, 4:3, 4:5, 5:2, 5:3, 5:4, 5:6, 8:9, 10:9.

Lastly, we have the "Advanced Chipset Features" menu, which also allows the memory bus frequency to be adjusted, this time by setting it to 200Mhz, 266Mhz, 333Mhz, or 400Mhz. The menu also includes options for tweaking various memory-timing options.
 

Next: Technical details.

ECS L4S8A