5 - The ECS X58B-A (2)

From left to right the two PS2 connectors for mouse and keyboard. Then, nice to see, 2 eSATA ports. One FireWire and then 6x USB 2.0 ports. Lovely to see are the two Gigabit Ethernet ports, and then the audio ports.

Now I'll just mention two improvements. Look at the tiny red micro-switch in-between the PS2 connectors and the eSATA ports. That's in fact a CMOS CLEAR button. Should you screw up your BIOS settings, just power off, press the button and your CMOS is cleared allowing you to boot up again.

The second improvement I've been confronting ECS with is an optical TOSLINK for audio. And look to the bottom left of the audio connector block, it's now included. Great, this is very decent connectivity.

This is the new LGA 1366 socket for the upcoming Core i7 (Nehalem) processor from Intel. As you can see, proper heat-pipe based passive heatsinks are used to cool the MOSFETs surrounding the socket as well. Also a very proper 8-pin CPU voltage pin header location.

This is what i adore. The Intel reference board had only four DIMM slots which still puzzles me, but here we spot the six, thus no lame 3 or 4, DIMM slots for DDR3 memory, supporting up to 24GB of RAM (with 4GB DIMMs when available) or up to 12GB (with 2GB DIMMs) through a 3-channel CPU integrated memory controller for a total memory bandwidth of 3200MB/s.
The ECS motherboard has a limit though, the memory can manually be set at a maximum of 1333 MHz clock frequencies. You can go higher yet will need to overclock the "FSB".