Intel totally dominates the motherboard chipset market as almost 57% of the motherboards sold on the planet are based upon an Intel-designed chipset. Intel accounts for nearly 77% of all CPUs sold on the market today. AMD has made inroads into the market, but Intel is likely to retake the performance lead in a short while with the introduction of their new Core Duo 2 CPUs.

Intel introduced the LGA-775 platform in April of 2004. At the time they released the 915 chipset for the mainstream user and the 925 chipset for the high-end market. In 2005, Intel introduced two new chipsets the 945 and 955 to support newer CPUs with the 945 chipset being the mainstream and the 955 being the high-end. This coincided with the 8xx series of Dual Core CPUs.

ECS is a mainstream maker of motherboards, video cards and other computer components. For many years ECS motherboards have been associated with the budget sector. Today ECS plans to move into the performance, feature and overclocker market and recent motherboards have borne that out with the quality of recent boards more in line with the top-end motherboards. Today I’m reviewing the ECS 945G-M3 motherboard based upon Intel’s 945G chipset.