Introducing The Motherboard; Introduction - ECS 945PL-A Manual

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Chapter 1

Introducing the Motherboard

Introduction

Thank you for choosing the 945PL-A motherboard. This motherboard is a high perfor-
mance, enhanced function motherboard designed to support the LGA775 socket Intel
Pentium 4/Celeron D/Pentium D processors for high-end business or personal desktop
markets.
The motherboard incorporates the 945PL Northbridge (NB) and ICH7 Southbridge (SB)
chipsets. The Northbridge supports a Front Side Bus (FSB) frequency of 800/533 MHz using
a scalable FSB Vcc_CPU. The memory controller supports DDR2 memory DIMM frequen-
cies of 533/400 MHz. It supports two DDR Sockets with up to maximum memory of 2 GB.
DDR2 Maximum memory bandwidth of 8.5 GB/s in dual-channel interleaved mode assum-
ing DDR2 533 MHz. High resolution graphics via two PCI Express slots, intended for
Graphics Interface, are fully compliant to the PCI Express Base Specification revision 1.0a.
The ICH7 Southbridge supports three PCI slots which are PCI 2.3 compliant. In addition,
one PCI Express x1 slot is supported, fully compliant to the PCI Express Base Specifica-
tion, Revision 1.0a. It implements an EHCI compliant interface that provides 480Mb/s
bandwidth for eight USB 2.0 ports. One onboard IDE connector supports 2 IDE devices in
Ultra ATA100/66/33 mode. The Southbridge integrates a Serial ATA host controller that is
SATA II compliant, supporting four SATA ports with maximum transfer rate up to 3.0Gb/s
each.
The 945PL-A motherboard is equipped with advanced full set of I/O ports in the rear panel,
including PS/2 mouse and keyboard connectors, COM1, LPT2, four USB ports, one op-
tional LAN port,one optional 1394a port and audio jacks for microphone, line-in and line
out.
Introducing the Motherboard