Review Conclusion of ECS X58B-A Intel X58+ICH10R Core i7 Mainboard

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Review Conclusion of ECS X58B-A Intel X58+ICH10R Core i7 Mainboard
Bluetooth 10 Mar 2009

Conclusion

ECS Black edition mainboard has always been one up than it's traditional designs in the past. The black PCB, copper coloured heatpipes and coloured connectors gives it a natural blend and elegance that stands out from the other X58 boards.

The board comes with 2 full length PCIe 2.0 full length slots in contrast to other makers that spots a 4 PCIe slots. Thus, this board would suffice for those who is willing to spend a bit more to do dual card SLI and CROSSFIRE. If you prefer to play with 3 way SLI/CF or Quad SLI/CF, this board should be the standard CF or SLI board of choice for LGA1366 users.

In terms of performance, the board was paired up with Kingston triple channel DDR3-1333/1800 memory modules which are programmed at CAS 9. Although we do not have a direct comparison with other X58 boards, the board seems to be in line with the rest when paired up with a Intel Core i7 965 processor.

The BIOS seems to have an abundance of options never seen on an ECS mainboard. Settings ranging from FSB, multiplier, RAM timings, voltage adjustments to IOH, CPU, VDIMM are all there for your tweaking. The missing element would be a software to tune the overcooking within Windows.

In terms of overclocking, we managed to get it stable and running the processor at 3.72GHz (155x24). (In another test, we only managed to do only 3.6GHz on the ASRock X58SuperComputer). If it doesn't boot, we can easily reset the system by pressing the CLR CMOS at the back panel of the mainboard. The board also comes with power and reset switch. On top of that, the DEBUG led also helps us to determine whether the system will boot up properly.

In conclusion, the board does work as it claims running well with the Kingston triple sticks of RAM at CAS 9-9-9-27-1T cmd DDR3-1800 (XMP used). We also find the BIOS a bit buggy when detecting SPD timings. Perhaps new BIOS could resolve these issues.

BIOS used : Latest from ECS website, please visit http://my.ocworkbench.com/bbs

Discuss

Pros

Debug LED
Power On/Reset Switch
Clear CMOS switch at rear of mainboard

Cons

2 PCIe 2.0 x16 slots only
No Software overclocking tools

Ratings

Here are my ratings out of 10.

Category	Score
Performance	9 / 10
Features	8 / 10
Ease Of Installation	10 / 10
Overclocking Features	8 / 10
Documentation	7 / 10
Packaging	7 / 10
Cost / Performance	8 / 10
Overall Rating :	8.1 / 10

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