I always get a little excited when I see a manufacturer move into "the next level". ECS is one of these companies that everybody remembers from their OEM motherboards, initial purple colored withfairly 'average' build quality as everythign was budget.

ECS however has been growing steadily in the retail market, and especially the Black series motherboards started to make a difference a year or two ago. But still, we always stumble into something that leaves room for improvement adn ECS always listnen. With next years chipset I tell you, ECS will become an even more important player into the market as the upcoming lineup looks fantastic.

On the short term though (end of June) they will be launching the P55H-AK motherboard. This motherboards supports full speed SLI and Crossfire by way of the included NVIDIA NF200 chipset that provides additional PCI Express lanes, up-to 3-way SLI will be supported in a 16:8:8 PCIe lanes configuration. Adding to the gaming side, ECS also uses the Realtek ALC899 chip for audio and that's then tied into a Creative Labs suite somehow, as the board supports a new feature called Sound Blaster X-Fi MB2 -- opening up EAX and the Creative software suite.

On this motherboard ECS added not one, but two NEC USB 3.0 controllers providing four USB 3.0 ports