Platform upgrade: Core i7-920 vs i7-3770 at 4.2GHz featuring ECS Golden Series Motherboard and Kingston
The ECS Z77H2-AX2 Golden board
Unboxing and Installation
Everything about the ECS motherboard is golden including the service. It comes (naturally) in a shiny gold box and gold is emphasied everywhere. If you are an enthusiast who likes gold and black, then this is the motherboard for you!
The box opens out two full-sized flaps, one on the top and one on the bottom.
These advertise the ECS motherboard’s features.
And here also we see gaming performance stressed. 
Upon opening the box, we see everything is packed securely and that there are a lot of accessories as befits a flagship motherboard. Here is everything out of the box.
We see lots of gold. It accents everything. And it also looks very nice even though it is perhaps a bit flashy or even ostentatious.
More gold, from another angle. The are slots for 4 DIMMS of DDR3 up to 32GB total. This motherboard supports the stock 1600MHz setting as well as overclocking the RAM to PC2800 speeds. Besides two PCI Express 3.0 x16 slots which work at 8x+8x bandwith each with dual video cards, there are two PCI Express x1 and two PCI slots.
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 Z77 chipset provides two 3.0Gb/s Serial ATA 2.0 two SATA 3.0 6.0Gb/s which can be set up for RAID 0/1/5/10 configurations. There are two additional SATA 3.0 ports provided by an ASMEDIA 1061 controller.
The motherboard is laid out reasonably well and the only thing that we miss is the possibility of a third PCIe slot for CrossFire-X3 or Tri-SLI which you can have with the ECS Z77H2-AX motherboard. However, we do not like the positioning of the CMOS reset switch at all. You can see the red jumper in the image (below, between the PCIe slots) which will be covered up by any full-sized video card. Ideally, ECS should move the reset button to the I/O panel.
Tip: If you do serious overclocking, overclock using the CPU graphics only or you will find yourself removing your video card to reset the CMOS.
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 ECS Z77H2-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. Originally we installed it into our Cooler Master Elit 430 mid-tower, but we wanted more room for our Noctua NH-DH14 and the highest overclock possible from our i7-3770K.
Installation
We are going to give a detailed installation of the ECS motherboard into our Thermaltake Overseer RX-I in the review coming up this week. 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. The Thermaltake Water2.0 Performer and Pro will both be featured in an upcoming “Air vs. Water” shootout with the NH-DH14. As much as we love the amazing Noctua NH-DH14, we like the uncluttered look of the watercooling setup.
Here is the motherboard inside the case and ready for installation.
The CPU and RAM are installed and power cables are plugged in.
As you can see, gold is highlighted against the black and it is pleasing aestetically.
Now we are going to install our massive Noctua NH-DH14 which allowed us to easily reach 4.8GHz with our Core i7-3770K while core temperatures generally remained below 80C under maximum load.
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.
Water Cooling
We installed our Thermaltake Water 2.0 Pro and were able to match the same 4.8GHz overclock with our Noctua cooler. The difference is that watercooling is less “cluttered” looking.
We have everything set up. Let’s turn our PC on and head for the BIOS.
No offense, but there are two main summary charts that are identical to each other. Is the second one supposed to show different games?
Don’t forget about the “[insert chart]” part! 😛
None taken. Thanks for pointing it out!
Fixed.
Never mind my previous comment, as it’s now fixed, thanks!
Of course, Civilization V does better with Ivy Bridge than with Bloomfield, all clocked the same. At 4.8GHz (IB), CivV is like 30% faster than Nehalem (Bloomfield) at 4.2GHz.
BUT what amazes me is that Nehalem still seems to be doing just as well as IB overall, clock-for-clock. In Crysis 2, Nehalem is like 15% faster than IB. At 4.2GHz, Nehalem still beats IB at 4.8 GHz in DX11 mode, by around 15%!! I was thinking of blaming it on the system memory bandwidth (with Nehalem using triple channel), but even at only 1200MHz, Nehalem still shines pretty much just as much as it does at 2000 MHz.
The case reverses in the favor of IB but only by a few percentage points for Crysis 1, LP2, HAWX2.
It goes to show that unless one is a serious Civilization V gamer, an overclocked Nehalem would be just fine for even a GTX 690. I would guess that Starcraft 2 and Skyrim (other CPU-limited games not tested here) are the only other games that show a noticeable improvement on the Ivy Bridge.
Thanks, apoppin for all of this benchmarking that pretty much nobody else on the ‘net have done with all of these games, on the still mighty Nehalem!!
Amazing work!
It would be one of these, but with an Athlon II X4 OC with maximum range and I7 3770K OC max.
Athlon X4 ~ 3.5Ghz vs 5Ghz i7 3770K for example
It would be interesting to see one of these with a single GPU both as a dual system which is where I think you will notice more.
Sorry for my English.
I have a 3770k and a I7 920. Its was a nice review because many people with older i7s are itching for an upgrade. I do think this review is biased in its language. The non scientific language of “Way Faster” vs saying its 8 percent faster is a dead give away. “What faster is subjective where a percentage is objective. Way faster to them seems to be any test that the Ivy beats the bloomfield in.
USB 3.0 ports are nice but can be installed in an older X58 board (they fail to mention)
For gaming its not worth the upgrade at all. For most windows tasks its not worth it.
For tasks that take hours then it might be worth it. Ie encoding, but here a 6 core would be better than a quad. So an upgrade to a 6 core might be cheaper on x58 than doing entire MB/RAM swap.
Not trying to rain on the parade but this review seems to want to justify the upgrade by using subjective wording rather than just stating the percentages.