ECS H57H-MUS Motherboard
Conclusions
Contents
It is always good to see a manufacturer improving the quality of their products. On H57H-MUS ECS added only solid capacitors, did a decent job on the voltage regulator circuit and add some overclocking options (this particular manufacturer has always been shy on overclocking).
We had mixed feelings about the two add-on cards to enable USB 3.0 and SATA-600 ports. Why not adding these features on the motherboard itself? Of course the manufacturer would have to kill two USB 2.0 ports to fit the two USB 3.0 connectors, but we think 12 USB 2.0 ports is already more than enough. Probably the chips and sockets wouldn’t fit this motherboard – we have to keep in mind that this is a microATX board.
The SATA-600 card may also cause trouble for some users: the second port is installed as an eSATA-600 port, making it hard for you to build a RAID array with two SATA-600 internal drives. On the other hand, the external SATA-600 can be handy for some users.
In summary, although it wasn’t love at first sight, this motherboard can be a good option for users looking for a fully-loaded microATX socket LGA1156 motherboard for Intel CPUs with integrated video.