ECS P55H-AK Motherboard

Conclusions

We were impressed by how ECS improved the quality of their products, starting with the overall look of the product. In the past they would use at least six different colors on their motherboards, making them to look cheesy and cheap. Finally ECS decided to use a more sober color pattern (gray and white), giving the P55H-AK a more professional looks. There is still room for improvement, though, as the gray pieces are not from the same shade of gray, the same happening with the white parts.

Speaking of colors, the only thing that we didn’t like about this motherboard was the use of the opposite color standard that all other manufacturers are using for the SATA ports. Instead of using white for the SATA-600 ports and black for the SATA-300 ports, ECS decided to use the opposite scheme.

Apart from these minor details, the forthcoming P55H-AK is a true high-end motherboard, as you can tell by the presence of the NVIDIA NF200 and the PLX PEX8608 chips, which allow your system to maintain a high performance even if you install three high-end video cards and decide to use the SATA-600 ports, the USB 3.0 ports and the Gigabit Ethernet connections all at the same time. On motherboards based on the Intel P55 chipset without a bridge chip performance may drop under this scenario.

The P55H-AK comes with two SATA-600 ports and two eSATA-600 ports controlled by separate chips, and four USB 3.0 ports. Two of these ports are permanently soldered on the rear panel, and the other two you can either install in a 3.5” bay or on the rear of your computer, using the practical adapter that comes with the motherboard.

Other important features include the presence of three PCI Express x16 slots (working at x16, x8, and x8), a professional-grade audio codec with on-board optical SPDIF output, a 14-phase voltage regulator circuit, and a POST diagnostics display.

This motherboard comes with decent overclocking options, but if you want more than increasing the basic clocks and voltages, you will need to buy a different (and likely more expensive) product.