Over at The Mirage, ECS had a couple things on display including the already-released PN2 SLI2+ Extreme (nForce 680i SLI) and the KN3 SLI2 Extreme (nForce 590 SLI). There weren't any new announcements, but we were told to stay tuned for COMPUTEX later in the Summer. For those wondering about the SATA issue that was discovered about a month ago on 680i-based motherboards, ECS has already released a BIOS update that fixes the issue (2006/12/21), so it all works good.

Also on display were two systems not only using those two motherboards, but also their 7950GTs in SLI. Yes, ECS makes video cards now (powered exclusively with nVidia GPU's)! At the moment you can get them through Newegg, but they should become more widely distributed over the year as they release more cards and get a feel for what the market wants from them.

Up close, you can see the rather large and shiny copper heatsink, which reminds us of something from Zalman. You can also see their trademark purple with the translucent fan. It looks like the RAM chips don't require heatsinks either, possibly due to the cooling by the ultra wide heatsink.

All-in-all, ECS didn't have much to announce at this time.  I did fiddle around with their gaming PC to play some Doom 3 on a 32" LCD TV. It was running quite smooth at 1360x768 with 4xMSAA at Ultra Quality. It just hurt my eyes to play less than a foot from the TV.  Then all of a sudden, the ECS folks booted me out of their suite before I even got to shoot anything.

ECS is finally hitting their stride in North America, and we're looking forward to more exciting hardware in 2007.

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