|
|
|||||||||||||||||
|
 Board shot  CPU Socket  CPU area  Qooltech The motherboard comes in the trademark black color that all ECS Black Series motherboards come in. Some people may question the color choice, but I prefer black to a purple color or some other weird color we've seen from other motherboard manufacturers. ECS's board is a ATX board with dimensions of 305x244mm which will easily fit into any ATX compatible case as that is the standard size.  Northbridge  Heatpipe  Southbridge  Memory slots The CPU area is clear of obstacles, meaning installation of large after market cooling solutions is possible without worry as to space. The Thermalright cooler we used in the Core i7 launch article fit nicely onto the ECS board with room to spare. On the upper top right side of the board is the 8-pin ATX power connector, a good position, as it leads straight to the PSU without snaking around the cooler as some boards tend to do.  8-pin power  24-pin power  Power and Reset  USB and Firewire The X58 Northbridge is cooled by ECS's trademarked Qooltech II cooling system. Starting from the ICH10R Southbridge, the chip is cooled by a passive heatsink with a heatpipe that leads to the X58 chip, which is cooled by another heatsink. Leading out from the NB another heatpipe leads to the rear heatsink which covers the MOSFETS. This effectively cools the NB, the SB, and the MOSFETS while maintaining a low profile that doesn't interfere with other components. ECS's board has six DIMM slots for DDR3 memory. The motherboard supports DDR3-1600 memory up to 24GB in capacity. Note that the Intel Core i7 CPUs support Triple channel DDR3 memory which means that the maximum memory bandwidth of the chipset is 51.2GB/second for DDR3-1066 and 76.8GB/second when using the maximum memory speed of 1600MHz in triple channel mode. Another point is that ECC memory is not supported by the Core i7 CPU.  Via chip  PCI Express x16 locks  CPU Fan  4-pin Molex Expansion on the board is dominated by the two PCI Express x16 slots on the board. As mentioned in the Features page, the X58 chipset supports either SLI or Crossfire. Note that the ECS board only has two PCI Express x16 slots for video cards meaning that 3-way or 4-way SLI or Crossfire is not possible on this board. A singular PCI Express x4 slot, 2 PCI Express x1 slots and a PCI slot round out the expansion on the X58B-A Black Series motherboard. The ICH10R SB supports up to 6 SATA drives natively. ECS outfits the X58B-A Black series motherboard with six sideways facing SATA 3Gb/second ports. The ICH10-R supports RAID 0, 1, 5, 0+1 modes. The board has done away with legacy devices such as the IDE and FDD ports but does have two external SATA drives on the back panel to support external SATA drives. These are controlled by a JMicron JMB 362 controller.  FP Audio  SATA ports  Capacitors  Rear PCB Onboard sound is provided by a Realtek ALC888S-VC CODEC. Audio solutions like the ALC888S-VC have taken the market away from companies like Creative Labs and Aureal who are basically bankrupt and in financial trouble due to onboard sound being âgood enoughâ for the vast majority of users. The ALC888S-VC CODEC supports up to 7.1 surround sound+2 channel front panel audio output. ALC888S-VC also supports all the features of Intel's High Definition Audio standard. The back panel IO on the ECS X58B-A Black Series motherboard consists of a PS/2 Mouse, PS/2 Keyboard port, 6 USB 2.0 ports, 1 Clear CMOS button, 2 external-SATA ports, a IEEE-1394 port, two RJ-45 LAN connectors, a Line-In, 4 Line out, and a Optical SPDIF Out port. The Clear CMOS button when combined with the Power and Reset buttons on the motherboard allow the end-user to turn on the computer when it is outside the box to test it before installing it in a case.  IO 1  IO 2  IO 3  Dual Giga LAN Contents:
 
|
|
|||||||||||||||
