ECS P67H2-A Motherboard

On-Board Peripherals

The Intel P67 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. These ports are located on the motherboard edge 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 black, being the opposite color scheme used by all other manufacturers, confusing users. We hope ECS can fix this.

Figure 5: SATA-300 (white) and SATA-600 (black) ports

Additionally, this motherboard has two eSATA-600 ports, controlled by a Marvell 88SE9128 chip. This motherboard doesn’t come with ATA-133 or floppy disk ports.

This motherboard has 12 USB 2.0 ports, six soldered on the rear panel and six available through three headers located on the motherboard.

One of the highlights of the P67H2-A is the presence of six USB 3.0 ports, four available at the rear panel and two on a front panel header. The Intel P67 doesn’t support USB 3.0 ports, so these ports are controlled by external chips. The two external USB 3.0 ports and two of the four rear ports are controlled by two NEC μPD720200 chips, while the other two rear USB 3.0 ports are controlled by a VIA VL810 chip. The motherboard comes with a 3.5” front panel adapter made in aluminum for you to use the two front USB 3.0 ports, but you can remove these ports of the adapter and install them at the rear part of your case, using a bracket that comes with the product.

Figure 6: Front USB 3.0 adapter

No FireWire ports are available.

The P67H2-A 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” head
er.

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.

The portrayed motherboard has two Gigabit Ethernet ports, controlled by two Realtek RTL8111E chips, which are connected to the system using a PCI Express x1 lane 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 7, you can see the motherboard rear panel, with external clear CMOS button, shared keyboard and mouse PS/2 connector, six USB 2.0 ports, four USB 3.0 ports (blue ones), two Gigabit Ethernet ports, shared analog 7.1 audio outputs, and optical SPDIF output.

Figure 7: Motherboard rear panel