ECS P67H2-A Black Extreme Motherboard Performance Review

ECS P67H2-A Black Extreme Intel “Sandy Bridge” P67 Motherboard

ECS is trying to improve the image of their products by releasing high end “Black Extreme” series motherboards. The latest in the “Black Extreme” series is P67H2-A Black Extreme. Based around the Intel P67 series chipset code named “Sandy Bridge”, the ECS P67H2-A Black Extreme supports the latest Intel second generation Core series processors. Over the past month we have taken an in depth look at the new Intel Core Processors, Mobile Processors, and motherboards from a couple different vendors (1,2). Our focus today is going to be on the performance and feature of the ECS P67H2-A Black Extreme.

One of the key features of the ECS P67H2-A Black Extreme Sandy Bridge motherboard that will separate it from the competition is the Hydra Core. What is that, you may ask? Well, in short, it allows you to run different graphics cards from different manufacturers. By that I don’t mean an AMD Radeon HD 5870 from XFX and one from Sapphire. What I mean is the core manufacturers, AMD and NVIDIA. Ultimately we will be able to run a combination like the ATI Radeon HD 5870 and a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 in parallel for improved performance. If you are curious about how this is accomplished, it is done using the Lucid HydraLogix 200 processor. Of course we will be putting the Lucid HydraLogix 200 processor to the test today with mixed cards and throwing a pair of Galaxy GeForce GTX 460’s into the P67H2-A Black Extreme to see how it compares to the NVIDIA SLI results on the previous motherboards that have come across the Legit Reviews bench!

Other features prevalent on the ECS P67H2-A Black Extreme include but are not limited to:

• Six Super Speed USB3 ports
• SATA6
• Turbo Boost 2.0
• Support for Unlocked Intel CPU’s
• Dual Gigabit LAN with Teaming

ECS P67H2-A Spceification

CPU	LGA1155 socket for 2nd Generation Intel Core Family and Unlocked Processors Supports “Hyper-Threading” technology CPU DIM 5.0 GT/S
Chipset	Intel P67 Chipset
Memory	Dual-channel DDR3 Memory architecture 4 x 240 pin DDR3 DIMM sockets support up to 16GB Supports 1333 DDR3 SDRAM
Expansion Slots	3x PCI Express Gen2 x16 slots 2 x PCI Express x1 Slots 2 x PCI slots
Storage	Supported by Intel P67 Chipset 4 x SATAII 3.0 Gb/s Host Controllers 2 x SATAIII 6.0 Gb/s Host Controllers 2 x eSATA 6.0 Gb/s
Audio	Realtek A:C892 8-Ch HD Audio Codec Compliant with HD Audio specifications
Rear Panel I/O	1 x PS/2 keyboard and PS/2 mouse combo connector 1 x Clear CMOS button 4 x usb3.0 ports 6 x USB2.0 ports 2 x eSATA ports 2 x RJ45 LAN connectors 1 x Audio port with 6 audio jacks
Internal I/O connectors and headers	1 x 24 pin Power Supply Connector, 8-pin 12V connector 2 x Serial ATA 6 Gb/s connector 4 x Serial ATA 3Gb/s connector 1 x USB3 front header 4 x USB2 headers 1 x front panel audio header 1 x SPDIF out header 1 x front panel header 1 x ME UNLOCK header 1 x Reset button 1 x Power button 1 x COM header CPU_FAN/SYS_FAN/PWR_FAN connectors
System BIOS	AMI BIOS with 32 Mb SPI Flash ROM Supports ECS M.I.B X Utility Supports ACPI&DMI, Plug and Play, STR(S3)/STR(S4)/S1, Hardware Monitor Audio and LAN, can be disabled in the BIOS F7 hot key for boot up devices option

There are a lot of items we need to get cover today, so let’s put our heads down and get to it! On the next page we will take a look at the retail packaging for the ECS P67H2-A Black Extreme, as well as the bundle that comes along with it!