ECS Elitegroup P55H-AK (V1.0) Pro Reviews

The P55H-AK comes with two SATA-600 ports and two eSATA-600 ports controlled by separate chips, and four USB 3.0 ports. Two of these ports are permanently soldered on the rear panel, and the other two you can either install in a 3.5” bay or on the rear of your computer, using the practical adapter that comes with the motherboard. Other important features include the presence of three PCI Express x16 slots (working at x16, x8, and x8), a professional-grade audio codec with on-board optical SPDIF output, a 14-phase voltage regulator circuit, and a POST diagnostics display. This motherboard comes with decent overclocking options, but if you want more than increasing the basic clocks and voltages, you will need to buy a different (and likely more expensive) product.

It's hard to say that a P55 motherboard that costing $299.99 can offer good value for money, the same as it's hard to say for any other 'enthusiast' rated hardware as there is always going to be a premium to pay to have the latest and greatest. What I can say though, is that the ECS P55H-AK motherboard is very competitively priced when all features and specifications are considered. It's probably not the ideal motherboard to casual computer users, as it's very much orientated towards the high-end enthusiast market, where features such as triple VGA setups, SATA-6Gb/s, USB 3.0, dual Ethernet, and 8-Channel HD Audio will be used to good advantage.

With this latest Black Series motherboard, ECS has shown that it is deserving of a spot among the top brands. Be it the features or its performance, the ECS P55H-AK was definitely competitive with its rivals. In fact, against many of the mainstream P55 boards available, the ECS board emerges as the clear features winner, no thanks to its support for 3-way multi-GPU configurations, full speed USB 3.0/SATA 6Gbps, higher memory frequencies and dual Gigabit Ethernet. Its performance too was highly competitive and it should hold its own against even the bigger brands.

The P55H-AK motherboard has just about everything you could possible want, or need, in a P55 based board. From the tri-fire SLI/CF to the multiple USB 3.0, SATA 3 and eSATA 6.0 Gb/s ports. The addition of the NVIDIA NF200 switch along with the multiple NEC D720200F1 chips and the PLX PEX8608 chip create a motherboard with the capability of sustained performance when using the high speed interfaces and multiple PCI-E slots that are available on this board. This is one of the most feature rich P55 motherboards available today at any price. The performance of the P55H-AK was right on par with the ASUS and Gigabyte we put it up against. That is saying a lot for a company that has just started trying to compete with the likes of ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI, EVGA, etc. in the higher-end enthusiast sector of motherboard manufacturers. They have a quality product here that should really help them compete in this sector.