ECS Sandy Bridge Motherboard Roundup - PAGE 1

Over the last few years ECS has really made a strong push in the enthusiast market with the introduction of their high-end Black Series motherboards. These new products include an improved visual theme as well as high-end features geared toward overclockers like on-board power/reset buttons, ECS’s exclusive Qooltech III thermal solution and use of 15µ of gold plating. All of these added to a huge improvement over previous generation ECS motherboards, but the Achilles heel of most ECS models continued to be their weak BIOS which greatly limited the overclocking potential of the motherboards.

With the release of the highly overclockable Sandy Bridge processors, ECS has updated their Black series products (including the “Black Deluxe” and "Black Extreme") to include a more robust feature set, and a new look. Most importantly however, these new motherboards use an improved version of the popular AMI BIOS which could increase the overclocking headroom and enhance ECS’s standing with the enthusiast market.

Unfortunately, the improved overclocking will only apply to the motherboards based on the P67 chipset. This is due to the internal limitations of the H67 Express chipset, which does not allow for any overclocking of the memory or processor.

We are going to be looking at three 6-series based motherboards; the H67H2-I, H67H2-M and P67H2-A. Two of the motherboards are based on the H67 chipset, while the third is based on the high-end P67 chipset. In addition, all the motherboards use a different form factor, ranging from the standard ATX form factor down to a mini-ITX motherboard ideal for small HTPCs.

With all the improvements that have been made to these motherboards, it’s clear ECS is continuously striving to improve their products and compete in the high-end market with the likes of ASUS, Gigabyte, ASRock and MSI. Also, with each model supporting various features and form factors, the new motherboards are versatile and can be used to set up a variety of systems using the Sandy Bridge platform.