ECS X58B-A Black Series Motherboard Review :: ECS X58B-A Black Edition Features

• Core i7 support
• External SATA
• SATA II 3.0Gb/second
• IEEE1394
• 8-channel HD Audio
• Qooltech II
• Over-Clocking
• ATI Crossfire X
• LGA 1366 Socket
• RAID 0, 1, 0+1,5
• Dual Gigabit LAN
• USB 2.0
• MIB
• Certified for Windows Vista

The ECS X58B-A Black Edition motherboard is based upon Intel's recently released X58 chipset and supports all LGA-1366 Socket CPUs including the Core i7 965EE, the Core i7 940, and the 920 which comprises Intel's entire family of the new CPU. Note that the FSB of earlier Intel CPUs has been replaced by the Quick Path Interconnect which has a transfer rate of up to 6.4GT/second. The X58B-A Black Series is a 6-Phase Power design that works with VRM 11.1 CPUs.

Qooltech II is ECS's cooler designed to cool the X58 chipset. ECS designed it out of copper and it cover s the Northbridge. The X58 chipset supports DDR3 memory in triple channel mode, which increases the possible memory bandwidth of the system by a wide margin. Note the memory controller is now on the CPU just like the AMD CPUs. The X58 chipset is the first Intel chipset to fully support NVIDIA's SLI multi-GPU or ATI's Crossfire X multi-GPU technology.

ECS calls their BIOS tweaking program Motherboard Intelligent BIOS or MIB. I'll cover this more thoroughly in the BIOS section of the review but they have tried to make their BIOS very flexible for the tweaker or overclocker that wants that flexibility to run their system overclocked. The ECS X58B-A Black Edition has Solid State capacitors meaning that they are less likely to break off and leak. ECS uses a ICH10R Southbridge chip to control the various IO on the board.