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ECS calls this board one of their Black Series of boards. This board has an all-black color for the PCB and is a micro-ATX sized board, meaning cases that can take a micro-ATX board or larger can take this board. Starting on the upper right hand corner ECS has included an 8-pin power connector. The MOSFET heatsinks are tall but unobtrusive and are connected by two heatpipes.
The CPU area is clear of obstacles with room to install coolers. There is a set of Solid capacitors surrounding the CPU Socket and the board has a 6-phase power design. ECS calls their cooling solution for the MOSFETs Qooltech III. Below the CPU area are four DIMM slots which support DDR3 memory up to 32GB of 2133MHz memory when overclocked.
The bottom of the board has the 24-pin power connector near the center of the board. A 3-pin fan header is in this position. The H67 Express chipset has a heatsink with a flaming arrow, like the heatsinks above the MOSETs. The board has five SATA ports next to the 24-pin power connector. The dark grey ones are the SATA 6 Gb/second ports while the white ones are the 3 Gb/second ports.
The left side of the board starts off with Power and Reset buttons. To the left of those are four USB headers to install up to 8 USB ports via bracket and Front Panel. This brings the total ports on the board to 14 with the ones on the back panel. The TPM header is next to the Clr CMOS jumper. Next is another fan header followed next to another system fan location by SPDIF and Front Audio headers.
The expansion options on this board are limited by the fact that the board is of the micro-ATX size with limited space. A single PCI Express x16 slot along with two PCI Express x1 slots and a PCI slot. If you want to install a HD 6970 or GeForce GTX 570 into the slot it will give you a powerful gaming system with this board when paired with a powerful CPU such as the 2600K unlocked CPU.
Onboard audio is provided by a Realtek ALC892 CODEC which is one of the more popular audio chips on the market for motherboards right now. It supports the Azalia standard. The rear I/O on the board consists of a VGA connector, a DVI-A connector, a HDMI connector and a DisplayPort connector. ECS has coined the term 4most Display as there are four different connections for the video. Six USB ports, of which two are USB 3.0, two LAN ports, an e-SATA port, and the 7.1 audio jacks round out the board’s I/O. There is also a Clear CMOS button on the board.
