ECS Elitegroup H67H2-M (V1.1) Pro Reviews

If you're building a media center or home theatre PC in particular, you'll find that the ECS H67H2-M motherboard is well suited to meet those requirements with it's HDMI / Display Port outputs and hardware acceleration of video transcoding. The ECS H67H2-M motherboard retails for about $125 CDN ($125 USD, £80 GBP) so it offers quite a lot on the value front. As you've seen in the benchmarks, the ECS H67H2-M is a compact motherboard that manages to live up to Sandy Bridge's excellent performance reputation.

ECS has done a good job here, with first-rate build quality being backed up by some good use of uprated components in the power circuitry and good quality, large, passive heatsinks. All of which will help to keep it as cool as possible in the confined spaces that the board will likely end up in.

Each of these boards from ECS is meant to fit in a specific segment. The Micro ATX Black Series H67H2-M brings a little flash and high-end looks to a board that will most likely be destined for use in an HTPC or regular system build where its pedigree might get overlooked. When performance is the same across a platform then all that is left is the feature set and cost. In terms of price, the ECS Black Series H67H2-M comes in at the upper end of the pricing spectrum at $139. Not the highest price I have seen for an H67 board but at the upper end. For that $139 price point you get a full featured motherboard with many enthusiast level parts. There is the debug LED, on board power and reset buttons, ECS 15μ gold process in the CPU socket and DIMM slots, Quooltech III heat sink package and more.

The ECS H67H2-M has a few serious check points against it as a board to use. The RAM timings in the BIOS are not changeable; the BIOS can be hard to navigate and does not implement any of the newer UEFI principles coming through with Sandy Bridge; the USB performance is sub-par, and the DPC Latency is the highest of the H67 boards we have tested. There are some very positive points with it – eJiffy is a great piece of software, you have double gigabit Ethernet ports, Power/Reset buttons on the board and a Debug LED, the 2D performance is better than average, and your fan options are better than some other vendors. I would prefer to see a cleaner BIOS, more fan headers and better USB performance become as standard. The ECS board comes with a three year warranty.

ECS tried to bring the H67 chipset up to the expectations of the enthusiast with its Black Edition H67H2-M. This board has dual Gigabit Ethernet ports, along with support for four types of display outputs. Other touches like a rear Clear CMOS button, onboard power and reset buttons and a heatsink design with heatpipes indicate that ECS is trying its best to enhance the mainstream chipset offerings. However, the microATX form factor does limit what ECS can add and we weren't impressed by the lack of options in the EFI BIOS for an 'enthusiast' oriented board. A S$189 retail sticker however gives it the price edge over the ASUS.

ECS builds a monster H67 chipset based motherboard that goes toe to toe with one of the finest P67 motherboards from Intel. With massive heatsinks, on-board power and reset buttons it's ready for anything you might be able to throw at it!

ECS has done a great job with their H67H2-M motherboard with four different display connections, which allow all current types of monitors to be attached to the computer without an adapter. Further all modern technologies such as USB 3.0, SATA 3.0, and support for the Intel Sandy Bridge CPUs. The BIOS has the ability to overclock the integrated graphics by up to 235%. The use of gold in the CPU and memory slots improves the lifespan of the motherboard. The integrated GMA HD 3000 graphics on the Core i7-2600K give playable performance in casual and mainstream games as long as the settings used are not high. This is a great board for HTPC users as the multiple display options gives you the choice of what display connectors to use.