ECS H67H2-M Motherboard

On-Board Peripherals

The Intel H67 chipset is a single-chip solution, and is also known as PCH (Platform Controller Hub). This chip supports two SATA-600 ports and four SATA-300 ports, but it doesn’t support RAID. The manufacturer decided to route one of the SATA-300 ports to the motherboard rear panel in order to give the product one eSATA-300 port. The other ports are located on the motherboard edge, and four of them are rotated 90°, so video cards won’t block them. The problem here is that the SATA-300 ports are white and the SATA-600 ports are dark gray, being the opposite color scheme used by all other manufacturers, confusing users. We hope ECS can fix this.

Figure 4: SATA-300 (white) and SATA-600 (dark gray) ports

This motherboard doesn’t come with ATA-133 or floppy disk ports.

This motherboard has 12 USB 2.0 ports, four soldered on the rear panel and eight available through four headers located on the motherboard. It also has two USB 3.0 ports soldered at its rear panel, controlled by an EtronTech EJ168A chip.

No FireWire port is available.

The H67H2-M comes with eight-channel audio, generated by the chipset using a Realtek ALC892 codec. Unfortunately Realtek doesn’t publish technical specifications for this codec at their website. The portrayed motherboard comes with an on-board optical SPDIF connector, and you can either install a coaxial SPDIF connector or route digital audio to your video card to have digital audio in the HDMI connector using the available “SPDIFO” header.

The analog audio jacks are independent if you use a 5.1 speaker set, but if you have a 7.1 analog speaker set you will have to “kill” either the mic in or the line in jack. This isn’t necessarily a problem, because if you want to have a 7.1 speaker system you will probably connect your computer to a home theater receiver or a digital speaker set using an SPDIF or HDMI cable.

The portrayed motherboard has two Gigabit Ethernet ports, controlled by two Realtek RTL8111E chips, which are connected to the system using PCI Express x1 lanes and thus not presenting any potential performance issues. These ports support the teaming feature, which allows your computer to connect at 2 Gbps with your network, if your network switch also supports this feature.

In Figure 5, you can see the motherboard rear panel, with VGA connector, DVI-D connector, HDMI connector, DisplayPort connector, external clear CMOS button, four USB 2.0 ports, eSATA-300 port, two USB 3.0 ports (blue ones), two Gigabit Ethernet ports, shared analog 7.1 audio outputs, and optical SPDIF output.

Figure 5: Motherboard rear panel

As you can see, this motherboard has four different kinds of video connectors, allowing you to connect it to any kind of HDTV or video monitor available on the market today.

Other smaller features present at the H67H2-M include the presence of on-board power and reset buttons, POST diagnostics display (which shows the CPU temperature after the system correctly passed the POST testings), the use of 15µ gold contacts (usually motherboards use 5µ gold contacts), and eJiffy (an operating system stored inside the motherboard read-only memory that allows you to access the Internet without needing to load the operating system or even without having a hard disk drive installed, being equivalent of ASUS’s Express Gate and MSI’s Winki).

In Figure 6, you can see all accessories that come with this motherboard.

Figure 6: Accessories