Haswell vs. Ivy in Gaming – The ECS Z87H3-A2X golden motherboard and i7-4770K

The ECS Z77H2-AX2 Golden board

Unboxing and Installation

Everything about the ECS motherboard is gold and black. It comes in a shiny gold box and gold is emphasized everywhere. If you are an enthusiast who likes gold and black, then this is the motherboard for you!  For a comparison, here is the older Z77 Golden MB:

The ECS Z77 (above) and Z78 (below) golden flagship motherboards are very similar in layout but not in design. The new Z87 motherboard has an ocean theme, and we see a gold and silver stylized fish as well as golden ‘waves’ serving as heatsinks, complete with a ‘hook’ (unintentionally; however, it intentionally doubles as a thermal monitor).  This is one of the most interesting industrial/artistic designs that we have ever seen.Before we take a closer look at the physical layout of the motherboard and its features, let’s look at the box that it arrives in.The box is also golden and it shimmers making it very difficult to capture properly in a picture.  It appears to be designed to stand out from other motherboard offerings at retail.  The box opens out a full-sized flap that advertises the ECS motherboard’s features.

And here also we see gaming performance featured as well as long-life premium components.  The many features are also printed on the inside of the flap while the motherboard layout is labeled on the box.

Finally, here is the back of the box.

Upon opening the box, we see everything is packed securely. Here is everything out of the box, aside from the motherboard.  Besides the mandatory manual, CD, quick-start guide and cover, the bundle is a little sparse as most of the bundled apps appear to be trials, but the dustplugs and BlueTooth antenna included can be very useful.

The manual is not as helpful as it could be.  There are many things listed but not explained.  For example, PCIe 3.0 bandwidth is 16X for any of the primary slots, but it is 8x+8x when used with 2-way SLI or CrossFire.  Also, extras such as Magix video, photo, and music software needs to be downloaded from ECS’ website.

More gold, from another angle.  The “waves” and the “fish” are nice touchs. The are slots for 4 DIMMs of DDR3 up to 32GB total.  Slots 2 and 4 are preferred when using 2 sticks of RAM.  There are no white slots as the motherboard manual suggests.  The Z87 chipset supports 14 USB 2.0 and 6 USB 3.0 ports while the ECS Golden Motherboard has 8 USB 2.0 ports (4 on the rear panel plus 4 on the motherboard) and 6 USB 3.0 ports (4 on the rear panel plus 2 on the motherboard).In the image above (bottom right corner) we see the buttons which control the power switch, automatic overclocking, and multi-function LED which also allows for viewing the CPU core temperatures directly.  There are three PCIe 3.0 x16 slots which operate at x8 when more than one is used.  At the bottom of the board (above) there is a single 1xPCIe slot and a mini-PCI slot in between the two top PCIe x8/x16 slots.  TriSLI is not officially supported because only the top slot is x16 while the other two are x4 each.  If you use three AMD cards in CrossFire-X3, the regular PCI slot is disabled and you have PCIe 3.0 x16/x4/x4.

The mini-PCI slot can be very useful for an mSATA SSD as it is connected to a SATA-600 port.

This motherboard supports the stock 1600MHz setting as well as overclocking the RAM to PC3000 speeds and above with overclocking.  It will support up to 32GB in a 4x8GB configuration. We used 2x4GB of Kingston’s new HyperX Predator PC2800MHz DDR3 at speeds of 2800MHz in this motherboard using the automatic XMP profile 1. We were only able to reach 2400MHz in EVGA’s Z77 FTW motherboard although its XMP profile setting identified it correctly.Above we can see the other side of the black PCB and – more gold.Here is the control panel looking from below.  A BlueTooth wireless transmitter makes setting up a home network effortless and convenient as well as eliminating the need for a wireless router.  Integrated CPU graphics uses a full size HDMI output that requires no active adapter to DVI as does the EVGA Z77 FTW motherboard, and that saves money.  There are connections for 7.1+2 audio although the implementation of it is only fair. 

Below the DIMMs are reset and power switches which are ideal for benching and testing. SATA (Serial ATA) ports are nicely positioned along the edge of the PCB. The motherboard is laid out reasonably well and we like the addition of a third PCIe slot for CrossFire-X3 although Tri-SLI is not supported.  There were only two PCIe slots with the ECS Z77H2-AX motherboard and we disliked the positioning of the CMOS reset switch in the Ivy Bridge ECS Z77 where the red jumper is covered up by any full-sized video card. ECS followed our suggestion and moved the reset button to the I/O panel where it belongs.The ECS golden board also sports Wireless BlueTooth and Wireless LAN dongles. Included are DVI, D-SUB and HDMI for video as well as audio ports. There are 4 USB 2.0 and 4 USB 3.0 ports as well as one eSATA 3Gb/s port. The audio codec and the Gigabyte LAN are both Realtek.  The Realtek audio (ALC1150 codec) is a new chip but it is somewhat noisy in this implementation when used with a good speaker system or with headphones.  Wireless BlueTooth 2.0 is incredibly convenient for networking although BlueTooth 4.0 is found on other motherboards.  Here we used Windows built-in ad hoc networking to connect our notebook PC with our desktop in a matter of a few seconds.

The ECS Z87H3-A2X is a very attractive motherboard. Let’s install our CPU and RAM and then install our ECS motherboard into our Thermaltake tower Overseer RX-I.

Installation

We are going to give a short recap of our installation of the ECS motherboard into our Thermaltake Overseer RX-I.  The motherboard arrives with it’s CPU pins covered.  If the board needs RMA service, it must be returned with the protection cap in place to protect the motherboard’s fragile pins.

Insert the CPU carefully in the right direction as indicated by the notches on the CPU and the indicated corner mark matches the motherboard placement and lock it down.

Insert the memory DIMMs.  If you are using two sticks, make sure to put them in slots 2 and 4; not 1 and 3 as the manual suggests.  There are no differences in the colors of the slots as the manual also suggests. Needless to say, it was a totally painless installation with the Noctual NH-DH-14 and then with Thermaltake’s Water2.0 Pro CPU watercooler.  As much as we love the amazing Noctua NH-DH14, we like the uncluttered look of the watercooling setup and its ability to work with any RAM.

As you can see, gold is highlighted against the black and it is pleasing aestetically.

Air Cooling

The only issue with our massive Noctua aircooler is that it covers up a lot of the motherboard and you must remove the outside fan to reach the DIMMs.  However, this time, the Kingston HyperX Predator RAM has such a high profile that it was impossible to use our NH-DH14, and so we opted for watercooling.  We installed our Thermaltake Water 2.0 Pro and were able to match the same 4.6GHz overclock with our Noctua cooler at a slightly cooler temperature. The real main difference is that watercooling is less “cluttered” looking.

We have everything set up. Let’s turn our PC on and head for the BIOS.