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At the back-end we see plenty of connectivity. A PS/2 keyboard connector, a total of ten USB ports of which the two blue ones are USB 3.0. We see two of eSATA (6G!) ports, dual Gigabit LAN ports and audio output both analog and Optical TosLINK. The audio panel is driven by the popular Realtek ALC889 HD codec which supports 7.1 channel audio.
The tiny button to the left is a CMOS clear switch. Rear panel IO is chucked full, just the way we like it.
When we flip the board 90 degrees we look at processor socket and a dual 8-pin CPU power headers. The board has a 14-phase voltage regulator circuit. Twelve phases are assigned for the CPU main voltage and two of them are used for the CPU integrated memory controller and L3 memory cache.
When you look at the processor socket itself you realize that P55 only takes Socket LGA1156 processors (Core i5 750 / Core i7 860/870). ECS uses 15ì gold contact on CPU socket and Memory slot pins. It offers 3 times extra anti-oxidation, should be better temperature resistant offer protection.