Shootouts

Intel P67 Shootout - The Top Guns

By Vincent Chang - 28 Mar 2011

ECS P67H2-A

ECS P67H2-A

In recent years, ECS has managed to raise its enthusiast profile with its more extreme, Black series, like this ECS P55H-AK and continuing with this trend, it has pulled out another Black motherboard bristling with premium features and components. In fact, looking at the packed PCB, we can pick out touches and details that could be seen as 'inspired' by the competition, from the presence of voltage measuring points to the 'EZ Charger' feature that promises to boost the charging speed for your iPhone/iPod/iPad devices. However, that's all part of the industry as the good ideas eventually make their way to all board vendors though implementation may be a different story.

First, this ECS P67H2-A comes with a Lucid Hydra 200 chip onboard. That's right, Lucid has found its wares becoming more popular since MSI first featured it in its Fuzion series and ECS has followed suit with this chip that allows for the installation of non-homogeneous graphics cards (meaning you can now mix and match between ATI and NVIDIA graphics cards for multi-GPU performance, provided you're running Windows 7). It's a move that signals ECS' intentions to compete in the highest end of the market and while we aren't big fans of the technology, it has its moments. For this board, you can have up to three such graphics cards, due to its three PCIe 2.0 x16 slots (in a x16/x8/x8 configuration).

Anyway, ECS seems to have picked up on what we call the 'unofficial' first rule of premium boards - good things come in pairs. Hence, the dual Gigabit LAN controllers from Realtek and the dual NEC USB 3.0 controllers on this board. There are only four SATA 3Gbps and two SATA 6Gbps ports from the Intel chipset, but ECS has thrown in a Marvell controller for an extra two eSATA 6Gbps ports at the rear panel. HD audio is handled by a Realtek ALC892 chip while ECS has ditched FireWire like many other vendors in favor of USB 3.0.

 With a similar dark gray and black color scheme as its previous generation of P55 boards, ECS is hoping to continue to improve on its premium offerings with this Hydra powered P67 board.

Four USB 3.0 ports here at the rear, with dual Ethernet LAN and two eSATA 6Gbps ports. It's certainly plenty of ports, though there's only optical S/PDIF. Oh and there's also a Clear CMOS button to the left of the PS/2 keyboard and mouse combo port.

All six of these SATA ports, including the two SATA 6Gbps ones in black, are from the Intel P67 chipset and aligned the way we preferred. Power and reset buttons are also found nearby.

The four memory channels (up to a total of 16GB) are rather standard, with the 24-pin ATX power connector below.

As you can see, the black PCIe 2.0 x16 slots are arranged to allow for dual-slot graphics cards. There's sufficient clearance here that you can almost use all the available slots if they are all of the single card variety.

An LED segment that displays POST messages. It has a big Celsius sign painted at its side, which makes us wonder if it will display CPU or board temperatures after POST. You can also see the USB 3.0 front panel connector, which connects to a separate panel for the USB 3.0 functionality.

And here's the included USB 3.0 front panel bracket from ECS.

More indications of what this board has, like its HD audio, dual Gigabit LAN and of course, Hydra! And like a certain vendor, ECS states proudly on the PCB that this board is 'Designed in Taiwan'.

The cooling system consists of dual heat pipes stretching across three heatsinks surrounding the CPU socket. Notice the quality of the components and chokes used here.

Like some vendors like ASUS and MSI, ECS has marked these voltage measuring points to make it easier for enthusiasts and their voltmeters.

Despite a PCB that appeared to be cramped with features and onboard ICs, we found the overall layout to be quite well-done. ECS has managed to fit three PCIe 2.0 x16 slots for dual-slot graphics cards while ensuring that the SATA ports are aligned properly out of way. The power and reset buttons may be a touch close to the tangle of cables from the ATX power connector and SATA ports but it's again placed to avoid any interference. True, there are some onboard USB headers that may be affected by a third, dual-slot graphics card, but there are enough of them that it shouldn't matter.

Meanwhile, the heatsinks look a bit more heavy duty than the ASUS board, which hopefully can translate to lower temperatures. While the hardware looks pretty promising, the BIOS however required a couple of updates before we were satisfied. Previously, it had a bug with the default values displayed for the 1, 2, 3 and 4-core Turbo Boost speeds in the BIOS and we also had issues when overclocking, where it appeared that our overclocked multiplier was not working as intended.

Although the BIOS update fixed these issues, the options themselves could be more transparent and user-friendly. It wasn't obvious how to go about changing the base clock on this board, as it was buried under sub-menus.

At least ECS has managed to keep the price extremely competitive against the other high-end P67 boards in our roundup, with its significantly lower S$329 price.

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