Product Showcase

In the left corner we spot a diagnostic LED displaying status codes and the CPU temperature. I'm happy to report that the status code can be found in the manual. Also here, a power and reset button.

In the middle we spot a USB 3.0 connector which you can use to connect brackets and frontpanel IO etc. USB 3.0 on this board is managed by three Ti 7320 USB 3.0 controllers. There are 4x USB 3.0 for RearIO and this connector has one Ti USB 3.0 controller assigned for frontpanel IO. With this particular model ECS includes a front panel bracket with two USB 3.0 ports as well.

There are a lot of smaller headers for additional USB 2.0 ports, audio IO, as well as frontpanel button/LED headers.

Check out the PCIe slot connectivity, that's four x16 slots and two x1 slots. Gen 3 compatibility is there as far as the motherboard goes in x16:x16:x8:x8 configuration. Excellent for say dual-graphics cards and then an x8 for a Physx card.

The board can support 4-way SLI (in 4x 8-lanes mode) unfortunately ECS does not include a 4-way SLI bridge, or even 3-way SLI bridge. So that renders that option obsolete. A 2-way SLI connector is included though.

Overall, the motherboard is incredibly feature rich and fairly good looking. There's a little too much white on there IMHO but other than that, the design works out really well. The board has five fan headers btw.