It has now been more than a month since Intel officially unveiled their worst kept secret, the Bearlake “P35” chipset supporting both DDR2 and DDR3, as well as upcoming 45nm processors. In fact, we were lucky enough to bring you a review on a P35 motherboard well before they were released. Since then we have reviewed boards from Gigabyte and ASUS, all of which have been very impressive.

Currently motherboards sporting the Intel P35 Express chipset range in price from $110 US all the way up to $250 US. The more expensive $250 US boards include the ASUS P5K Deluxe and Gigabyte P35-DQ6, both of which feature amazing overclocking abilities, superior board designs and excellent feature sets. There are also cut down versions of these boards costing just $150 US or less. So while it appears that ASUS and Gigabyte do have the P35 motherboard market fairly well covered, ECS who ranks in the top four largest Taiwan-based motherboard manufacturers, is moving in.

However, they have not built another heatpipe crazed motherboard with a monstrous 12-phase power design. Rather ECS has done what they do best, created an affordable motherboard using a high-end chipset. The ECS P35T-A (Rev 1.0) is a very basic motherboard featuring very few additions other than the Intel P35 chipset itself. The board design is very simple and nothing special to look at, while the cooling setup could not really be any more basic.

Other give aways to the boards simple nature includes the 4-phase power design, along with a 4-pin 12v ATX connector rather than the 8-pin version used by most Intel motherboards. The ECS P35T-A is actually very much like the Intel BOXDP35DPM, Biostar TForce TP35D2-A7 and MSI P35 Neo-F motherboards. These three boards all retail for roughly $110 US and have comparable features to that of the P35T-A. Therefore, while we are yet to find the P35T-A retailing anywhere online, we expect the price tag to be around the $110 US mark or less.