Intel P67 Shootout - The Top Guns
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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.
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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