ECS Elitegroup P67H2-A (V1.1) Pro Reviews

The ECS P67H2-A Black Extreme is a performance oriented ATX motherboard with a fantastic set of gaming and overclocking features, all set on a sleek black and grey PCB that'll make your expensive chassis proud. ECS has undergone a massive image improvement in the last couple years.

When the ECS P67H2-A was released, it retailed at $290. Now, it's available at Newegg.com for $240, or $190 with the current mail-in rebate (expires 7/31), putting it in the path of the majority of the P67 boards we've reviewed this year. The board itself performs as you would expect out of the box, but there's nothing special in that. Feature wise, excluding the Hydra for a moment, this board could come in as a good tri-AMD GPU board. The internal SATA port count is a bit low compared to the other boards around in this price range (two rather than four), however that is at the expense of supplying two eSATA 6 Gbps on the I/O panel. The distinct lack of fan headers is also worrying. In contrast, there is an abundance of USB ports on the back (6 USB 2.0, 4 USB 3.0) and headers on board - though unfortunately the USB 3.0 header is obscured by any board length GPUs in the second PCIe x16 slot.

I have to say that ECS P67H2-A and ECS P67H2-A2 mainboards look practically impeccable only in terms of exterior design and theoretical functionality. Among the minor drawbacks we only pointed out too few fan connectors, which is not a critical problem. However, the longer you work with a mainboard, the more issues you may uncover. Inconvenient BIOS with serious errors, not very useful or even completely non-operational software, increased power consumption of both mainboards… They took great care of users by providing additional connector brackets or USB 3.0 panel, but at the same time acted with great neglect by making the black cursor in the BIOS completely invisible against the dark background. As a result, the success of ECS P67H2-A and P67H2-A2 mainboards may be quite a challenge, although e sincerely wish Elitegroup not to stop at this point and keep up the good work in developing their very promising Black mainboard series.

ECS' P67H2-A is the other attractively priced P67 board, with a similar price as the ASRock. It also packs a full range of features, including Lucid's Hydra chip, that puts it a notch better than the ASRock. This board adopts the enthusiast features found on the more established brands, but while the hardware was impeccable, the software side, the BIOS was not up to the mark. Patching it will help reduce the bugs, but the options are still not user friendly enough.

ECS really listened to gamers and the enthusiast community when they designed the P67H2-A. Users wanted the ability to use GPUs from AMD and NVIDIA together so they wouldn't have to buy new graphics cards for SLI or CrossfireX so ECS added Hydra Core technology. We proved the Lucid Hydra chip performed brilliantly in 3DMark Vantage and I'm sure it will work well with supported games too. The black PCB combined with the black and silver heatsinks really make this board look edgy and impressive. Overall, the P67H2-A earns PC Perspective's Silver Award for its originality, available graphics options, and gorgeous layout and design.

ECS has taken a bold step by adding the Lucid technology to the board, and it does give a lot of flexibility when it comes to setting up the graphics. The inclusion of the USB 3.0 panel is a nice idea too, because it allows you too add front USB 3.0 ports to a case, which are only just beginning to surface on the latest PC case designs. The one real dislike about the board will only really concern you if you want to overclock it. We had an early version of the Aptio BIOS that had an unfinished look about it, which will hopefully improve with any upgrades coming down the line.