Gallery - the ECS P55H-A motherboard

Okay let's start off with the photo shoot. Here we have product packaging and bundled items. You will receive the basics really consisting of a manual, driver CD, eJiffy software, IDE PATA cable and four SATA cables that match the color schema of the motherboard.

As you can see, in red, two x16 PCIe graphics slots. If you use one your graphics card will have 16 PCIe lanes, if you go for Crossfire, then the ports will be configured as x8/x8. In black, two PCI slots and then we see a x1 and x4 PCIe slot. BTW what I find impressive is how clean looking the motherboard really is.

Back panel connectivity then. From left to right that's a PS2 keyboard and mouse connector. A small CMOS clear switch. Then I count a total of eight USB 2.0 ports and one eSATA port controlled by a JMicron controller, 1x Gigabit Ethernet. Digital audio in the form of an optical TOSLINK connector, and then all the way to the right the analog audio connectors.

Right side view... a very clean design. Yep, it's a good looking motherboard. Unfortunately the 8-pin header (in white) has been positioned completely wrong. It needs to be at the lower side here at the bottom of the photo. A bit of a shame as the rest of the connectors are all positioned well.

Let's zoom in on the heatsinks...

Yeah that's nearly art isn't it? An aluminum heatsink with a copper element in it. I tried figuring out what it looks like... but yeah, you tell me... an animal? Dragon's head maybe? Either way the board design is passive and the cooling works really well. We'll show you some temperature readings later on in the article.