BIOS features (video) | Power Consumption | Temperatures

BIOS features

Below, an overview of the BIOS. The BIOS very much caters for overclocking and offers a really wide variety of choices.

Since showing motherboard BIOS screenshots always misses out a lot we are now switching to high-definition video footage showing you around in the BIOS. This way we hope to give you a better insight of BIOS features and functionality.

A plethora of options can be found really. Small side note, if not enabled at default click on HD and select 720P in the YouTube window to see the high-definition footage. We record our footage in 1080P. That can help out a lot in readability and sharpness, especially when showing a BIOS with a lot of letters and numbers.

We hope you like this new approach to showing you BIOS features; and as you can see, this motherboard has a fantastic BIOS feature set and firmware flash options.

eBLU BIOS flash software

We also wanted to show you a new handy feature that ECS offers to make BIOS updates really easy. They developed a small Windows application called eBLU, and within your operating system this application can look up the latest System BIOS, download it and install it all with the help of just a few clicks.

Anyway -- have a look at the video where we update the System BIOS with the help of this application. Very easy, very handy. BTW - this is a reference video taken on another ECS motherboard we recently reviewed.

Power Consumption and temperatures

The new Clarkdale based processors have gotten a bit of a redesign plus die-shrink and as such they are very energy friendly processors. A processor like the Core i5 661 consumes roughly 80 Watts, and that is with all cores stressed. Next to that, clever power management allows the internal voltages and processor multiplier to drop, core independent.

As you can see, these are very respectable numbers. Mind you that this was done with the ECS H57 motherboard, an SSD, optical drive, 8GB memory and both solely the IGP and added Radeon HD 5870 graphics card. For the best power consumption we recommend you to have BIOS features like EIST and C1E enabled and within Windows set your performance mode to balanced (allows the processor to clock down when idling).

Temperatures are very good as well. With an average air cooler you can expect temps like these:

Now I need to mention that these temperatures are managed with a Zalman Performa CPU cooler -- you'll reach maybe roughly 40 degrees C max, really amazing.

Of course results will vary with different motherboards and cooling solutions. But as a baseline the temperatures definitely are promising, especially with overclocking in mind. We measure at 100% CPU load is 2/4 cores 100% stressed with Prime 95, voltages are left at default, processor Turbo mode is enabled. Overclocked temps of course will differ, but we'll show you that in another separate chapter.