 |
Closer Look
 |
 |
As you were probably expecting, the board sports lots of gold. All of the IO ports, capacitors, and heatsinks are either plated or painted gold. Unfortunately the shade of gold on the heatsinks is a little off from that on the caps and IO ports which looks sort of cheap.
 |
 |
By making the board a full ATX form factor, ECS was able to offer lots of expandability options with two PCIE x16 slots, three PCIE x1 slots, and two PCI slots. The PCIE x16 slots run at x8 when two cards are installed though.
Along with all of the expansion slots, you also get four RAM slots which run at 1866MHz and can be overclocked to an insane 2600MHz.
 |
 |
ECS also gave us 7 x SATA 3.0 (6Gb/s) ports with 6 facing toward the front of the case and one located on the face of the board.
The IO panel is fairly extensive, offering just about every port you would need. You have a VGA, DVI, HDMI, and DisplayPort to choose from for onboard graphics. You also get 2 x USB 2.0, 4 x USB 3.0, 1 x ethernet, 1 x eSATA, and the standard audio ports. One nice extra feature ECS included was a “clear CMOS” button so you can quickly and easily reset the BIOS, which is handy for overclocking.
Yay, knock-off gold colored substandard Taiwanese solid capacitors. The gold color makes them perform better.