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

BIOS & Driver Installation

Setting up and configuring the BIOS is easy although it is not necessarily intuitive.   ECS has greatly improved their BIOS menu navigation and you can now use a mouse.

One new upgrade over the Z77 Golden motherboard that we really like is that you can now use a USB flash drive to store 1024×728 resolution screenshots of any BIOS screen by pressing F9.  It was not easy to find the right flash drive that would work for us, and some USB slots work better than others, but the end results are much nicer than using a camera to capture images from the display.

This is the first screen that a user is greeted with upon entering the BIOS.  It is called EZ Mode.

After you pick your language from the Main menu, you have a choice of setting everything to default, entering the Boot, Advanced, Chipset, M.I.B. X (overclocking), Boot, Security and Exit menus.  There are more sub-menus that we are not showing as some of them are devoted to options that cannot even be changed.

There are many sub-menus from the Advanced menu as shown below:Here is the CPU Configuration, under the Advanced tab.  Some of these settings should probably be changed for moderate overclocking.  The settings as shown below are default.

Also, under Advanced are the Fan Controls.  Default settings as shown were fine for getting our i7-4770K to 4.5GHz.

PC Health Status is also under the Advanced tab.

Power Management is under Advanced also.

SATA can be configured under this sub-menu of Advanced.

There are several sub-menus under Chipset.

M.I.B. X is where the overclocker goes.  This is default.  Here all the settings are default except for the CPU Ratio which is set to 42 for an overclock to 4.2GHz.

There are several sub-menus, including for adjusting the memory.  Here the BIOS correctly identifies 16GB Kingston’s HyperX Beast RAM and sets the XMP profile automatically.  For benching, however, we used 8GB Kingston’s HyperX Predator RAM at 2800MHz.

There are further adjustments for fine-tuning the DIMMs manually as well as setting Voltage for just about everything.  Here we used 1.300V to stabilize 4.2GHz to pass Linpack benching.

Here is the Boot Menu and we have highlighted the Windows 7 or other OS configuration.  The Kingston HyperX SSD is set to boot first.

Security and passwords can be set in the next menu:

Finally, it is time to visit the Exit Menu where we can return to the first screen in EZ Mode, Save, Discard, or Restore Defaults.Pressing “F4” is the same as ‘Save and Exit’ while pressing “F3” resets to default. And we have pressed both buttons by mistake because of their close proximity to each other.

The BIOS is a significant improvement over older ECS motherboards, but it ultimately fell a bit short when it came to some important options and we will continue to quest for more than 4.6GHz with our Core i7-4770K.

Driver Installation

The ECS motherboard driver CD works automatically and painlessly to quickly install the needed drivers which are reasonably up-to-date.  The latest drivers are found on ECS’ web site.When you begin, the Device Manager reports a lot of “unknown” hardware.It is possible to do an unattended install as the PC will reboot itself until all of the drivers are installed.Success!

eBLUs and automatic driver updates

We have never been happy with this feature as it has never worked for us with previous ECS motherboards including for their Z77 Golden motherboard. You are supposed to be able to automatically update your BIOS securely and safetly over the Internet. It promises much, but in the years that we have been using it, it has never worked – until now!

We were able to update our ECS Golden motherboard from its shipping BIOS to the very latest conveniently under Windows.

If  doesn’t deliver, you always have a less convenient option to make a bootable flash drive to flash your BIOS.  Flashing BIOSes are somewhat risky, so ECS includes a back-up BIOS for the first time in their motherboards in the event of the worst thing happening.

As to the driver updates, just as with years before, if you click on it, you get taken to the ECS web site where you can manually download the drivers. We would hope that they continue to improve this section of their site and support to make it more automatic.

Let’s look next at overclocking Haswell on the ECS Golden Series Z78 motherboard.