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ECS P55H-AK - Entering the Big Leagues

By Vincent Chang - 1 Oct 2010

BIOS Settings & Test Setup

BIOS Settings

The BIOS settings are typical of what you'll see on many motherboards, though ECS does have a section, its M.I.B. X (MB Intelligent BIOS X) which allows the user to tweak the system and clock frequencies as well as voltages. These settings are dependent on your installed processor so the listed settings below are relevant only for the Core i7-870, which is the processor used in our test. ECS also has an auto-overclocking tool with three settings, Light, Medium and Heavy, that can ramp up your overall clock speed with one click. Saved profiles are also available for those who want to custom their own. In our test, we managed to get the Heavy setting (our processor speed went up to 3.5GHz with 1603MHz memory clock) running with no trouble.

Some of the more relevant BIOS settings are listed below:

  • Base Clock: 100 - 600MHz
  • CPU Ratio: 9 - 22x
  • Memory Clock: Auto, 800, 1066, 1333, 1600MHz DDR
  • Memory OC: 1800, 1866, 2000, 2133, 2200MHz
  • CPU Voltage: -0.900 to +0.945V (0.015V steps)
  • Memory Voltage: -0.80 to +0.63V (0.01V steps)
  • CPU VTT Voltage: -0.80 to +0.63V (0.05V steps)
  • PCH Voltage: -0.80 to +0.63V (0.01V steps)

While the auto-overclocking tool worked well, our attempt to overclock the board manually resulted in a maximum base clock of 180MHz, which is rather disappointing considering that 200 - 220MHz was what we usually managed for most other boards.

Test Setup

We have tested a number of Intel P55 motherboards previously. In order to keep these results directly comparable, we have chosen to replicate the system setup used, even if some of the drivers may seem a bit dated now. The following components were used:

  • Intel Core i7-870 (@2.93GHz, Intel Turbo Boost, HyperThreading enabled)
  • 2 x 1GB Kingston HyperX DDR3-1333 @ 7-7-20 CAS 7.0
  • Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 200GB SATA hard disk drive (one single NTFS partition)
  • ASUS GeForce 9800 GTX 512MB with ForceWare 190.38 drivers
  • Intel INF 9.1.0.1007 and Intel Matrix Storage manager 8.9.0.1023 driver set
  • Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate

The following benchmarks were used to determine the performance of the P55 motherboards:

  • BAPco SYSmark 2007 (ver 1.05)
  • Futuremark PCMark05 (ver 120)
  • SPECviewperf 9.0
  • Futuremark 3DMark Vantage
  • AquaMark3
  • Far Cry 2
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8.5
  • Performance 8.5
  • Features 9.5
  • Value 8
The Good
One of the more fully featured P55 board in the market
Excellent layout
Competitive performance
The Bad
Those extra features will cost you
Runs relatively warmer and with a high power draw
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