ECS P55H-A Motherboard Review :: Bundle

Board

8-pin power

CPU Socket

Back of board

Starting on the upper right hand corner of the board we see that ECS has moved the 8-pin power connector more towards the center of the board instead o the usual placement on the right hand side of the board as is normally found on most P55 motherboards. There are three LEDs that light up depending on the load whether high, medium or light changing the system to best utilizes the available power.

Solid capacitors

MOSFET heatsink

P55 Express chipset

DIMM Slots

Moving to the CPU Socket we see that ECS’s board supports the LGA-1156 Core i5 and I7 CPUs o the market via a Socket-1156 interface. There is a small row of low-profile Japanese capacitors surrounding the CPU area on three sides. This arrangement should allow for the use of after-market cooling solutions as there is nothing blocking it.

Power Phase LED

CPU Fan header

24-pin power

Sys Fan header

The right and top MOSFETS have had MOSFET heatsinks attached to them. Below that is the PWM for the 4-phase power. The CPUFan is located below the MOSFET heatsink on the right hand side of the board. There are four DIMM Sockets for up to 16GB of DDR3-1333MHz DDR3 memory on the board. These are arranged in two banks of memory, with each bank signified by two like colored DIMM Sockets.

SATA ports

IDE

Power and Reset

SPDIF O

The bottom right side of the case has the 4-pin case fan header. To the left of that is the 24-pin power connector. The SysFan header is located next to the ATX Power header. To the left of the header are the board’s six SATA ports. The ports are angled meaning installing or removing HDDs doesn’t require the removal of a HDD. Intel’s RAID controller on the system supports RAID 0, 1, 10, JBOD modes.

The next item on this board are the standard Power and Reset buttons located next to the SATA ports. Onboard Power and Reset buttons are always welcome additions to a motherboard as it allows a user to install the board outside of the case and power it on using a PSU. The left side of the board starts off with the Front Panel I/O. The schematic for the wires is located in between the SATA and Power buttons.

Expansion

Case fan

FP IO

USB

ECS has included three headers for USB ports. This brings the total supported on the board to 14 with eight on the Rear I/O area. A COM port, the SPDIFO port, a CD-In port, the Front Audio port completes the left side of the board. The expansion possibilities on the board include two PCI Express x16 slots. If two video cards are installed they operate at half speed. A PCI Express x4 slot, a PCI Express x1 slot and two PCI slots bring the total expansion slots on the board to six.

JMB361

Realtek RTL8110L

ICS

ASMT

The onboard sound on the ECS P55H-A motherboard is provided by the Realtek ALC888 CODEC, a venerable sound solution that has been popular among board manufacturers for the last few years. The ALC888 has ten DAC channels that provide 7.1+2 channel simultaneous audio output (Multi-Streaming). Realtek’s ALC888 is HDA compliant meaning it supports all of the functionality of the High Definition Audio standard.

The Rear I/O on the board consists of eight USB 2.0 ports, a PS/2 keyboard port, a PS/2 mouse port, a RJ-45 jack for the onboard Gigabit Ethernet, a SPDIF jack, five audio jacks, an external SATA port and the Clear CMOS button. The RJ-45 jack is controlled by a Realteak RTL8111DL Gigabit Fast Ethernet PHY. The ECS P55H-A board has a full complement of rear I/O and the inclusion of a Clear CMOS button on the back means you can reset your BIOS without opening up the computer.