ECS P67H2-A Black Extreme motherboard Review – Intro
Bluetooth 24 Jan 2011
For those who have been ardent ECS fans, the Black series is the top notch board series of ECS boards. Being the best, it has amazing features that will surely be welcomed by users.
Based on the Intel P67 Express chipset, this board supports the Sandy Bridge processors e.g. 2600K. It supports dual channel memory of up to DDR3-2133 with 4 DDR3 to a capacity of 16GB.
There are 3 x PCI Express x16 slots, Gen2, 2 x PCI Express x1 slots, Gen2 and 2 x PCI slots. This board also has the most amazing number of USB ports. It has 20 x USB 2.0 ports (10 at back panel & 10 at front panel) and 6 x USB 3.0 ports (4 at back panel & 2 at front panel). As for storage, it supports 2 x SATA 6Gb/s ; 2x eSATA, 4 x SATAII.
So far, we have reviewed quite a number of P67 boards, to date, none of them uses the Hydra technology. ECS sees the opportunity to differentiate it from the rest by introducing a board powered by Hydra technology. With Hydra support(A-mode, N-mode , X-mode), you can now mix and match different AMD and NVIDIA card to speed up graphics performance. You no longer need to be tied to a certain vendor or same card to upgrade and speed up your graphics performance (in X mode). Moreover, the Lucid LT24102 supports 32 PCI Express 2.0 lanes, which doubles the PCIe lanes of normal P67 motherboard. By using LT24102 PCIe Gen2.0 bridge, ECS P67H2-A can support 3-way graphic technology with more bandwidth to the cards.
Other features include 8 channel Realtek ALC892 HD audio, Dual GbE with Teaming based on RTL8111E. It also has QoolTechIII Dual heatpipe and all Solid Capactiors, 12 phase design for 130W support. For debugging, it has easy Measure point, Debug LED + System Temerature. THere is also Easy Bottom+ CLR CMOS and EZ charger support.