ECS P67H2-A2 Black Deluxe Motherboard Preview

Closer Look

Just like any good meal, presentation is key in a lot of things. Upon receiving this retail sample and opening up the cardboard shipping box, the first thing that greeted me was a very attractive holograph infused onto the motherboard box.

This was the first time that I have ever seen such attractive packaging and it definitely raised my expectations of what awaited me inside. Included was the P67H2-A2 itself along with 8 SATA 6Gb/s cables (lock pin type), SLI Bridge, I/O shield, user manual, quick setup guide and driver disk. In addition to all this was a dual port USB 3.0 cable with an optional 3.5” bay for the front or expansion slot bracket for the back of the system. There was also a small bag with a few screws to mount the USB bay as well as another bag with 6 USB caps.

The board itself is a standard sized ATX form factor measuring 305mm x 244mm. A nice touch in keeping with the Black Series theme is the black PCB on which it is built. The large double heatpiped heatsinks have a black and silver flame across them which is pretty ‘cool’. So cool in fact that ECS named this system the Qooltech III Dual Heatpipe. This is used to cool the Voltage Regulator Modules or VRMs. The other, flatter heatsink is what cools the P67 chipset.

Across the top section of the layout we see the 8-pin CPU power connector, the 4-pin CPU fan header and the 4 DDR3 memory slots. Down the right side we have a 3-pin fan header, 24-pin ATX main power connector, 8 SATA ports (4 grey @ 6Gb/s & 4 white @ 3Gb/s) and last but not least, the temperature monitoring LED. This LED also functions as a Debug LED.

The bottom section of the board has the usual connectors and headers for front panel audio and USB 2.0 and 3.0 (including EZ Charger but more on that later), S/PDIF out, 3-pin fan header, clear CMOS jumper and of course the power and reset switches as well as the LED headers.

The expansion slots from top to bottom are a single PCIe 1x, followed by 2 PCIe 16x and then 2 PCI. The only drawback of note here is that Intel designed the chipset to feature a full 16x in each lane for a single video card but switches to only 8x + 8x when running a multi-GPU setup, whether SLI or CrossFireX (the board supports both).

The left side of the board is basically just the back I/O panel and includes a Clear CMOS button, a PS/2 Keyboard/Mouse port, 2 USB 2.0 ports (in black), 4 more USB 2.0 ports (in red), 2 eSATA ports (also in red), 2 LAN ports, 2 more USB 2.0 ports (in black) for a total of 8 USB 2.0, 2 USB 3.0 ports (in blue), an optical S/PDIF output and the usual 5 audio ports.

In the centre of the board lies the LGA 1155 socket, also known as Socket H2. This will be the resting place of some lucky Sandy Bridge CPU. There is nothing much to see on the back of the motherboard except for the backplate around the CPU socket.