ECS X58B-A Black Edition Motherboard Review

ECS X58B-A Box and Board

The box has your standard mythical creature on the front along with badges advertising all the features incorporated into the board. The actual quality of the box was impressive though, heavy cardboard with perfect folds.

The accessories aren’t too crazy, just your standard SATA cables, an eSATA cable, and the manual.

In general the board looks rather nice. The color scheme isn’t too garish and the components look rather nice.

The socket features 6 phase power for the CPU and a heatpiped heatsink for the mosfets.

The board features 6 memory slots for triple-channel performance. Single phase PWM is used for the memory.

The board has an ICH10R southbridge which includes 6 SATA ports. A huge step forward, there are no IDE or FD ports. The power and reset buttons are great for testing on a bench while the LED is helpful for debugging.

There’s plenty of expansion slots available for most configurations. The two PCIe slots have full x16 electrical functionality for full bandwidth performance.

The board has a slew of connections available. Two gigabit Ethernet ports, six USB ports, a FireWire port, two eSATA ports, and strangely enough mouse and keyboard PS/2 ports. Handily there is also a CMOS reset switch. For audio connectivity there are 4 line-in ports, one line-out port, and one optical SPDIF port.