ECS X58B-A Black Edition Motherboard Review

ECS X58B-A BIOS Images

Below are the BIOS images for the ECS X58B-A. It features a modified AMI BIOS with the all too familiar blue background and yellow text.

The main BIOS screen shows all the sub-menus available. Thankfully there aren’t any features buried within many sub-menus, all options are a button press away.

The Standard CMOS Setup menu lets you set the date and view the connected SATA devices.

The Advanced Setup menu is chock full of features. Here all the power-saving settings are available along with the boot sequence and QPI frequency. Under the Hard Disk Drive sub-menu you can select the boot order if you multiple disk drives.

The Integrated Peripherals menu should typically be left un-touched unless you are benching with this board. Here you can disable everything from Ethernet to USB. The SATA Configuration option is used to enable onboard RAID functionality.

The Power Management Setup menu lets you configure the PC to power on with external devices like a keyboard or Ethernet packet.

The PCI/PnP Setup menu lets you specify which video output you’d prefer to power on immediately. Typically this will be a PCIe device.

The PC Health Status menu can be most confusing. The System Temperature isn’t the CPU temperature but I believe the X58 temperature while the Offset to TCC Activation Temp is the delta between the current CPU temp and the max temperatures for the processor(100C). So in this case the NB is at 42C and the CPU is at 49C.

This the default options for the MIB menu. Here you can adjust the frequencies and voltages of the components on board. By default overclocking is disabled and the memory runs via SPD timings.

These images show the maximum voltage and QPI values along with the memory controller adjustments. With 400MHz QPI and current chips walling at 222MHz, there is no bottleneck there. The voltages are more than sufficient for the average overclocker and provided in fine enough steps to let you dial in your system.