Final words and conclusion
Final words and conclusion
ECS is back at it again with a very nice and feature rich motherboard. At this price level however it will have to compete with some of the bigger names in the industry like ASUS, MSI and Gigabyte
The baseline performance of this product is at the level of other Z87 motherboards, and when tweaking, well as you have been able to see we reached 4600 MHz stable. On that note, overclocking is much more difficult with this ECS motherboard than any of the other motherboards I've had my hands on. The UEFi BIOS is somewhat disorderly and some of the functions have been implemented from a BIOS programmers mindset, and often that results into a non logical user experience. There's a lot of work for ECS to be done there.
Please do remember that Haswell processors, just like Ivy Bridge, are mind numbingly irritating to cool once you increase CPU voltage. For this review we used a dual-fan-dual-radiator D14 from Noctua, we do this on purpose. We do get the question every now and then as to why we do not liquid cool the processor. That's simple, we choose a high-end heatpipe cooler to emulate and replicate the most common OC situations you guys apply at home. See, most of you guys use heatpipe coolers. Albeit the AIO Liquid Cooling kits are definitely getting more popular, but these often cool at the very same performance level the Noctua D14 offers. For this review we did produce all overclocked results at 4600 MHz with roughly 1.300 Volts on the processor. The build quality of the board is fine really, you have a nice 12 phase power design with nice looking and good quality components. It seems trendy to color the capacitors gold these days, but sure, improved component selection will help out with a longer lifespan.
Aesthetics
I mentioned this earlier on in the article already, but I personally feel that when you design a motherboard you need to stick strictly to 2 tones in terms of colors, e.g. black/red or black/white or whatever. Now from the ground up the ECS board looks good, but the color schematic isa tad too busy, we see red, black, gold, chrome/metal .. there is a lot going on on the color design. Which I find too distracting. The overall layout and heatsink design is good though, you can hardly argue about that. Combined with quality components the Z87 series will offer you a high grade class motherboard with enthusiast options like, USB 3.0, WIFI, seven SATA3 ports and then some more. To finalize the design ECS implemented the oh-so popular EZ LED Debug Display, EZ Dual Bios, EZ Click OC, EZ Enter BIOS, EZ Clear CMOS. You will also notice a Power and reset button.
Final words
Overall the ECS Z87H3-A2X is good in design, adequate in its feature set but my nagging point is simple, the board does not shine and rise above the competition. I mean very little is wrong with this product other than what I've remarked on the BIOS and color schema. But if ECS is to sell these motherboards in large quantities, they will need to focus on that x-factor. IF ONLY this board could be all black with just the gold colorized capacitors I'd probably already have a different opinion. So yeah it boils down to aesthetics for me personally. With that said I do need to add a note: taste is personal .. so you might think it looks great.
Realistically though, everything you need is there, with good build quality, components and sure, looks. It offers you everything and anything you need from a high-end class Haswell processor platform, in terms of features, USB 3.0, SATA3, PCIe Gen 3.0, ease of tweaking and sure, in the design and component selection most of it is done right as well. The can also use multiple GPUs of course. I noticed NewEgg has these boards in stock right now at a sales price of 239 USD. Here in the EU we spotted them for 215 EUR. That's not a bad price really. Armed with two Gigabit Ethernet jacks, BlueTooth, WIFI everything you will require is just there. But ECS will need to revamp the BIOS. Other than that it is a lovely little motherboard that will appeal to the mainstream to high-end PC gaming crowd.
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