ECS Z97 Machine Motherboard Review

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Final Words & Conclusion

The Platform & The Motherboard

The Intel Z97 chipset all by itself is not really interesting from an upgrade point of view if you bought a PC in say the last two years. It is a re-spin of the Z87 DNA. There are a couple of differences that the chipset however offers, and that's making PCI-E storage units compatible with standards like SATA Express and M.2 PCI-E SSDs. But if you purchased a Z87 motherboard and a Haswell processor last year already, by all means there is just no reason to upgrade whatsoever. Even coming from Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge processors and the Z77 platform will not change my mind about this recommendation. The big conundrum however is this: Z97 motherboards can be very interesting if you are in need of an upgrade. See the motherboard manufacturers simply went nuts with their motherboard designs, and I believe that 2014 has to be the best year of them all if you look at what the motherboard manufacturers did and are now offering. The latest iterations of the uEFI BIOS interface have finally become mature and I've actually started to really like them. It's easy to navigate through with and without a mouse and a couple of new features like the monitoring pages just kick black booty. So pop a nice liquid cooling kit on the processor and you will get to the 4600 MHz range with a 4770K fairly easily. 

Storage

Combined with four SATA 6Gbps ports and an M.2. interface you will have sufficient storage connectivity. So storage wise, albeit there's not a lot; there's isn't much to complain about. More interesting I find to be the all new M.2 interface, pop in an M.2 compatible PCI-E SSD. Our tests however with this interface on the ECS board results into below par performance. I am still investigating what happened there. 


 

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Taste differs per person, but admittedly we do appreciate how the Z97 machine looks. The black dark scheme combined with the nicely designs heatsinks make it a fairly attractive product to look at really. Just sheer awesomeness in a dark PC case. Lacking are some extra LEDs perhaps, and sure it does not have the allure of the expensive motherboards that are offered by Gigabyte, MSI and ASUS. But it's okay, especially when you consider where ECS came from years ago.

 

Final Words

Overall I'd classify the ECA Z97 Machine as a very decent motherboard that you can purchase at good value. It will not offer heaps and heaps of features, but it does have enough onboard to make it stand out from other budget motherboards. Remember you can find this product at a price of under 100 USD. For that money you can do 2-way SLI / Crossfire, get good baseline performance, you can tweak a little bit (although the tweaking experience is far from the big brands in terms of EUFI tweaking).

The overall build quality is OK, we see decent component usage and a good layout. That said, the PCB is thin, very thin and you can quit easily bend it. So be careful with installing / seating this product into your chassis. I just don't get the upwards facing SATA connectors though. They might not be blocking graphics cards but the standard is 90 degrees angled ones. The diagnostic LED is a welcomed feature, but it would be nice that once Windows boots up, that it would display the CPU temperature, and not a status code for 'OK'. Massively missing is a CMOS clear button BTW, this is the old fashioned style of moving a jumper if you need a CMOS clear, and during our overclocking experience I found that to be a mild annoyance. I do have to complement the audio features here, as over the standard realtek codec used like two years ago, we now see huge improvement on both hard and software side that is way more appealing to the audiophile. I like the gigabit Ethernet jack, but we are missing WIFI though. Combine the decent looks with the features like the SATA 6 Gbps and M.2. ports, the Intel Ethernet interface and the 7.1 channel HD audio as delivered by the high-end Realtek ALC1150 codec and we already get a smile on our face. Sitting on top of that codec is a SoundBlaster Cinema 2 audio suite enhancing audio even further. Slowly but steadily audio solutions on-board a motherboard are becoming really good in terms of quality at audiophile levels.

The motherboard is multi-GPU up-to 2 way SLI/Crossfire ready. Aside from my comments, we feel that this is a decent motherboard with similar looks, it offers a nice audio solution and is one of the better looking ECS products to date. We like to see some more availability in re/e-tail, but if you are on the lookout for a cheap good value motherboards, then the ECS Z97 Machine comes recommended as a nice value alternative.

Handy related downloads: 

“Different roads sometimes lead to the same castle.”

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