ECS P67H2-A motherboard review

Aaah yea... we are on a freakin' stampede of P67 reviews, and we have more coming. Today the turn goes to the folks from ECS who put out some serious kit on the market.

One of the most talked about topics of technology this year will be Sandy Bridge from Intel and very likely Bulldozer processors from AMD. Intel however started the year fresh and launched a handful of these little Sandy bridge gems already. If you have not done so, please read our reference Core i5 2500K and Core i7 2600K review to get an update on the new processor architecture and the grand performance they deliver.

Of course with new processors also come new motherboard chipsets. For the consumer desktop side of the market you will basically see two Sandy Bridge based chipsets, H68 for the more generic, mainstream and HTPC usage, and then the P67 chipset as a performance part for the new motherboards series. Now each and every motherboard ODM jumped on P67 as well, it's just a heck of a lot of fun. And the ODMs had time to prep their P67 alright, most of the designs were already finished by late Summer 2010, everybody just needed to wait for Intel to release the processor that goes along with these motherboards.

That extra time was however not a bad thing, it gave more time to R&D departments to refine their designs and perhaps be a little more creative.

ECS was also working on a few of these P67 motherboards and is making sure that both NVIDIA and AMD graphics cards work combined together. Yep, they are adding a Lucid Hydra chip like some of the competition is doing as well.

Now granted we are not keen on the extra chip at all, as overall experiences with Hydra are far from impressive or user friendly and adds overall costs to the mainboard you do need to pay for.

Anyway, the offering tested today is the P67H2-A socket LGA 1155 motherboard which is powered by a 14-phase VRM. An absolutely lovely to look at motherboard as this is a serious design you guys.

The motherboard comes with three PCI Express 2.0 x16 slots as well as a pair of PCI Express x1 and two PCI slots. The motherboard also shows dual Gigabit Ethernet and two NEC USB 3.0 controllers that will bring you a total of four USB 3.0 ports. You'll also get six SATA 3 Gbps ports and two SATA 6 Gbps controllers (for two internal ports) and a number of USB 2.0 ports, plus eSATA.

Anyway, have a quick peek and then let's head onwards into the full review.

The Intel 68 Series Chipset

Paired with the new Sandy Bridge based processors comes new motherboard chipsets, ten in total of which five are intended for desktop processors, namely the P67, H67, Q65, Q67 and B65. Next to the new chipsets there is also a small socket change. Previous Clarkdale Core series processors were seated onto a LGA 1156 package (socket). The new SB processors do not share that same socket, Intel placed them onto socket LGA 1155, one pin less.

The primary reason here is that a last generation processor will not work with a series 6 chipset and vice versa. So you can't install by accident, a Clarkdale based Core i5 on a P67 motherboard.

Now, luckily this doesn't mean you'll be needing a new cooler, your old LGA 1156 CPU cooler is compatible with the LGA 1155 motherboard measurements. Let's have a look at the primary features of the 82P67 Platform Controller Hub chipset.

Segment	Corporate	SMB - B65	Consumer H67	Consumer P67
Socket	LGA 1155	LGA 1155	LGA 1155	LGA 1155
Memory channels / DIMM per channel	2 / 2	2 / 2	2 / 2	2 / 2
USB2.0	14	12	14	14
SATA Total (Max number of 6Gb/s)	6 (2)	6 (1)	6 (2)	6 (2)
PCIe 2.0	8	8	8	8
PCI	Yes	Yes	No	No
Integrated Display	2	2	2	n/a
Performance Tuning	No	No	No	Yes

Above, you can see the primary desktop chipsets released, H67 and P67 will be the two chipset you are dealing with. For end consumers like you and me the H67 chipset will be less performance targeted and comes with support for monitor connectivity.

The one significant difference in-between H67 and P67 is that the P67 does not support the embedded GPU inside the processor or any of its functions. P67 requires a dedicated graphics card.

The P67 chipset is targeted at performance and enthusiast end users, allowing much more tweaking and providing performance features. As you can understand, we'll be testing a lot of these chipset based motherboards, some of which will also have support for the new uEFI BIOS. A graphics user interface BIOS that is going to fascinate you.

Interesting to know is that the new 67 series chipsets will come a SATA 6G controller and though not native, all of them will very likely come with USB 3.0 support by using a NEC controller. P67 will have 16 PCIe lanes available for your graphics card (x16) but can be split down into two x8 PCIe lanes for graphics cards if you like to pursuit multi-GPU setup, hence SLI and Crossfire will run quite well on them.

The Intel 82P67 Platform Controller Hub (PCH) SATA2 ports can be configured in RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 with Intel's Rapid Storage Technology.

The chipset now comes standard with an Intel Gigabit LAN (Intel 82579V) controller, on the previous chipsets this was an optional for ODMs, this time around... it simply sits there and can be used by the motherboard ODM likely at a small fee. So I expect a big increase in Intel based LAN connectivity the upcoming year, though a lot of ODMs will still opt to add a Realtek IC.

The motherboard has a lot connectivity on the rear IO panel. Dual Gigabit Ethernet, multiple NEC USB 3.0 connectors that will bring you a total of four USB 3.0 ports, next to the six USB 2.0 ports. Optical TOSLINK S/PDIF audio for eight-channel audio, CMOS clear button, two eSATA connectors yeah that's tucked full alright.