ECS is no stranger to innovative motherboards. The PF88 Extreme hybrid board, with its ability to run both AMD and Intel processors, springs to mind (see PCW August 2005).

The company’s latest design, the PF22 Extreme, continues this trend, being the first Intel-based board to support ATI’s Crossfire dual-graphics setup.

While the jury may be still out over the virtue of the Crossfire technology, it’s always good to see a company offering alternatives to the usual ATI chipset that, until now, has been the norm for Crossfire motherboards. The only cloud on the horizon for this board is that Intel’s 975X chipset is fast approaching, and it may or may not support both SLI and Crossfire.

The PF22 is built on the now familiar ECS purple printed circuit board. It shares the same sparse look of recent ECS boards, which leads you to think it lacks features. Once again, though, this is far from the truth.

Built around Intel’s 955X Northbridge and ICH7R Southbridge combination, the board supports all Intel’s 1,066/800MHz FSB processors, including the Pentium D dual core, and has four Dimm slots supporting up to 8GB of dual-channel 667/533MHz DDR2 memory.

The Northbridge is cooled actively by a small fan while the Southbridge uses a passive heatsink. As the board uses the R version of the ICH7 Southbridge there is Raid support (Raid 0, 1, 5 or 10) for the four Sata2 ports controlled by the chipset. Another two Sata2 ports are controlled by a Silicon Image chip.

The PF22 is a well-featured board with Crossfire support. Sadly, we were unable to test the dual-card support in time for this review due to a lack of Crossfire Master Cards, but keep an eye on the Test Bed for an update.

Full performance results

Compare against other motherboards