H67 – A Triumvirate of Tantalizing Technology

Overview

Truth be told, I have not played with an ECS board in quite a while.  Every chipset, they come in with some product that does not really hit the radar – either in terms of price, availability, or performance.  Last year at Computex, they snapped up the award for ‘Best IC & Components’, and even showed off some of their P67 offerings (one of which will be subject to review in the near future).  In actual fact, ECS has 14 models of Sandy Bridge capable motherboard listed on their website – 4 P67, 6 H67 (1 ATX, 4 Micro-ATX, 1 Mini-ITX) and 4 H61 – so they’re definitely targeting a wide range of markets here.

After testing this board, I come away with mixed feelings.  There are certain things that ECS does quite well – the eJiffy application, 2D performance is quite good, idle power with no GPU is 13W lower than the ASRock H67, has a Debug LED and Power/Reset buttons on the board, and SATA write speeds.  However, there are plenty of things that the board does very poorly on – the BIOS is woeful, overclocking is non-existent, real-world USB performance lags behind the competition, and as the most expensive board in this roundup, leaves me scratching my head what that extra $20 is spent on.

Similar to the ASRock H67 board we tested, the ECS also fails to implement the maximum CPU turbo multiplier properly.  In single threaded mode, the CPU would run at a 3x multiplier increase rather than the 4x we are lead to believe.  It would vary rarely hit the 4x multiplier, but not in any constant sense.  In pure throughput terms, this makes the board perform worse than the P67 boards at stock, but as it has happened to all the boards here, then this must be down to a feature of the H67 chipset.

This board also defaults the RAM to a higher specification than some other boards.  If your kit is better than 1333 MHz C9, the memory will be set to 1333 MHz, 8-8-8-24 timings.  If the kit is 1333 MHz C9, then 1333 MHz C9 will be chosen.  These timings are oddly unchangeable in the BIOS. 

The ECS H67H2-M is a ‘Black Series’ edition ECS board, their premium H67 Micro-ATX model, and was available at retail for $140.

Visual Inspection

Despite what I said above, this board is quite aesthetically pleasing, as motherboards go.  The black and white livery provides stark contrast against offerings by other vendors, who like to stick to the blue and white scheme.  The VRMs are covered by a pair of heatsinks connected via pair of heat-pipes, and are considerably larger than those seen previously on even P67 boards.  This could be that ECS may have gone for cheaper VRMs that produce a little more heat to increase some profit margin, at the expense of VRM cooler size, and indeed the heatsinks are hotter to touch than the other boards, even when left at idle.

The socket itself has no trouble fitting the stock cooler or my Corsair H50-1 water cooling solution.  While there could be an issue fitting some larger coolers, one would not be needed, as H67 does not support CPU overclocking.  The Intel stock cooler does its job here quite easily, even at full load.  However, if you are going down the Corsair H50 route, there are not enough fan-headers to go around – I found one for the pump and one for one of the fans, but you’ll need a fan extension cable and/or a 3-pin to molex converter to get a second fan enabled, if you’re that way inclined.

The board contains 5 SATA ports – two SATA 6 Gb/s and three SATA 3 Gb/s.  All but one of these ports are angled.  Underneath these are the Power/Reset buttons, a welcome addition on any board, and usually paired with a Debug LED, which is located to the left of the chipset cooler.  The front panel connector here does not have the labels applied directly – you will have to hunt around the PCB to find which pin is which.  There is also no USB 3.0 header on the board, so all USB 3.0 has to be via the back panel.

The PCIe slots are laid out in an x16, x1, x1, PCI configuration, which leaves an x1 and the PCI slot free in case of dual cards.  I would have preferred an x1, x16, x1 arrangement at the top, as if you have a RAM fan cooler (such as the G.Skill we used in testing), having a dual slot long card in the PCIe x16 doesn’t let you fit that RAM cooler.  But in changing the configuration of the PCIe, something would have to be done about the lone SATA port sticking out of the board.

The back panel of the board contains the standard four video outputs with H67 – D-Sub, DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort.  We also have 4 USB 2.0 ports, 2 USB 3.0 ports (powered by an Etron controller), one eSATA 3 Gb/s port, a set of Audio ports including SPDIF out, and two Gigabit Ethernet connectors, which is a surprising addition on a H67 board.  Technically these ports (powered by Realtek RTL8111E controllers) support Teaming, to double the combined input/output if and when required – this is a very specific application but a more than welcome addition.  You will notice that ECS do not include PS/2 ports on the back panel, though.