ECS Z170 Claymore and Z170 Blade Motherboards Shown At Computex

ECS might not be the first name gamers think of when building a new gaming PC, but the brand keeps chugging along and churning out LEET Gaming motherboards for pretty much every Intel chipset generation. This week at Computex 2015 the folks over at ECS are showing off the latest Intel 100 series boards, specifically those using the Intel Z170 chipset. These boards feature the LGA1151 socket and are designed for the upcoming Intel Skylake processors that are due out later this year. They are not going to be compatible with Haswell and Broadwell processors that are out now.

The first board that ECS was showing off is the Z170 Claymore pre-production sample without the chipset and VRM heatsinks. This LGA1151 board appears to be one of their flagship Z170 models and it has a 12-phase VRM, four DDR4 DIMM slots for dual-channel memory kits and five PCIe x16 full length slots. The board features HDMI 2.0 and DisplayPort video connections as well as 8-channel (7.1) HD audi with the Realtek ALC1150 audio chip. The board has two USB 3.1 ports, six USB 3.0 ports and six more USB 2.0 ports. You also have a M.2 slot, six SATA III 6Gbps ports, and one SATA Express slot that covers all your storage needs. There doesn’t appear to be any wireless on the board, but there is a Realtek Gigabit LAN port on the board for wired internet connectivity. The boards sinage says that 2-way graphics cards are supported, so we assume that you can run 2-way NVIDIA SLI and AMD CrossFire multi-GPU setups on both the ECS Z170 Claymore and ECS Z170 Blade.

Next up we have the ECS Z170 Blade, which is a micro-ATX board that has a reduction in features due to its smaller size. For example you have a 9-phase CPU VRM design, two full sized PCIe x16 slots and 6-channel (5.1) HD audio. The board still retains a M.2 storage slot, two USB 3.1 and six USB 3.0 ports.