Icrontic has always had a soft spot for ECS motherboards. The venerable K7S5A was the foundation for multiple computers assembled by Icrontic’s Folding@Home team just a few years ago. It was cheap, accessible, and stable enough to run a stock Athlon XP processor at 100 percent CPU load for weeks on end. Team 93 members hoped and prayed for a BIOS update that would allow some overclocking to help squeeze any extra power out of the systems for the sake of protein research, but back then ECS seemed content in its place in the market providing “cheap and cheerful,” no-frills boards.
It wasn’t until recently that ECS came out of left field with the introduction of their Black Series motherboards. Perhaps they grew tired of sitting on the sidelines watching companies like Gigabyte and DFI come up from the ranks of also-rans and into the spotlight as enthusiast boards. We’re not sure what sparked their fire, but over the course of the past year, ECS has worked at providing motherboards that are both inexpensive and feature-rich.
It hasn’t been an easy road, but now that ECS has a few boards under its belt it seemed like a great time to test the new P55H-A Black Edition Socket 1156 motherboard. The Lynnfield Core i7 and Core i5 processors target Intel’s mainstream and casual enthusiast customers; the same demographics ECS has been aiming for. It seems like a match made in heaven, or at least Taiwan. Lets see how this $100 motherboard fares.
What you get
ECS has stepped up its game in the packaging department. No longer a slave to bland boxes, they’ve joined ranks with the video card companies and hopped on the “lets make it black and add fantasy art” bandwagon. They get an A for effort since the products now stand out on the shelves at Fry’s or your local computer parts shop.
Oh man there's lightning and a dragon and everything!
Inside we get two CDs; one with drivers and another with ECS eJIFFY, a quick booting thin Linux distro featuring a web browser, basic image management software, and a chat program that works with multiple IM clients. Also included is a nice color fold-out diagram with motherboard installation instructions, the system manual, motherboard back plate, and requisite cables.
All this plus a few cables.
Just show me the board
Black is the new green.
ECS gets style points for the Black Series. The black PCB is slick and tastefully accented with two red PCIe x16 slots, and yellow and orange DDR3 sockets. The whole package is rounded out with simple black aluminum finned heatsinks with copper accents over the PWMs. ECS gets kudos for using all solid caps now too, adding to the board’s reliability.
They still have PS2 ports because they kick it old school.
Overall, the layout of the board seems solid. The location of the 8-pin power socket and auxiliary power plug are questionable, but with the abundance of bottom mounted PSU cases, it makes some sense to give it a central location. Same goes for the location of the CMOS battery, but it’s partially remedied with the red reset button (see above photo) mounted on the back panel.
A view from the other side.
One final bit about the board’s construction: The socket on this board is a Foxconn piece that’s been known to fry under extreme overclocking conditions. Why any extreme overclocker would use the ECS board is beyond us, but it goes without saying that if you go crazy with phase change and liquid helium cooling, pumping additional power to the CPU with this board will likely land you with a shiny new paperweight that smells of melted plastic.
The socket looks crowded...
... but it's not.
There's ample space for tall heatspreaders on the RAM.
Here’s the breakdown:
MEMORY
- 4 x 240-pin DDR3 DIMM socket support up to 16GB
- Support DDR3 up to 2130+(oc)/1333/1066/800 DDR3 SDRAM
EXPANSION SLOT
- 2 x PCI Express gen 2.0 x16 slots
- 1 x PCI Express x4 slot
- 1 x PCI Express x1 slot
- 2 x PCI slots
STORAGE
- 6 x Serial ATAII 3.0Gb/s ports
- 1 x Ultra DMA133/100/66 port
- 1 x eSATA
- Software RAID0, RAID1, RAID5, RAID 10 configuration
AUDIO
- Realtek ALC888 8-channel audio
LAN
- RealTek 8111DL Gigabit Fast Ethernet NIC
REAR PANEL I/O
- 1 x PS/2 keyboard & PS/2 mouse connectors
- 1 x RJ45 LAN connector
- 1 x Audio port (Line-in, Line-out, Mic-in)
- 1 x SPDIF port
- 1 x Clear_CMOS button
- 1 x eSATA
- 8 x USB ports
The BIOS
The P55H-A has a basic, but overclocker-friendly BIOS. All the basic settings one needs to mess with are available and easily adjusted, from voltages to memory timings to clock rates. If you’re looking for advanced tweaking abilities, move along. This isn’t a DFI board, or even ASUS. It’s much simpler.
The biggest gripe we found in the ECS BIOS is that it throws things out of order. DRAM timing is always listed as 7-7-7-18 (CL-tRCD-tRP-tRAS) but here it’s 7-18-7-7 (CL-tRAS-tRP-tRCD). Why they’d break convention makes no sense as it’s guaranteed to seriously confuse people and cause system instability when people who aren’t paying attention try to set their SPD.
The second niggle we found with the ECS board was that it doesn’t like DDR3-1600. Sure, it says it does on the box, and it has the option to run at DDR3-1600 in the BIOS, but if you select it you’re greeted with a system that doesn’t start. Cue the BIOS reset button conveniently located on the back panel.
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