At first I would like to thank ECS for offering me their Z77H2-AX Black Extreme Motherboard for testing and reviewing

 

About ECS:

"ECS, the Elitegroup Computer Systems, was established in 1987, and is approaching its 23rd year of business. More than two decades, ECS has overcome a great deal of obstacles facing new businesses and has experienced the joy of significant growth and development. Her main focus has expanded to not only motherboards, but also desktop and notebook computers, graphics cards and other mobile products. ECS is strongly committed to develop cutting-edge technology in order to generate innovative products under environmental friendly designs. ECS comprehensive system of quality control provides our clients with reassurance and fosters long term cooperation.

Green Touch, Good Life

ECS commits to protect the Earth by reducing the global environmental loading as the priority of her corporate sustainable strategy. Confronting more and more global environmental impacts; climate change, natural resources depletion and the crisis of ecological imbalance, ECS devotes the Green Solutions for the Earth sustainable development without compromising customer satisfaction. ECS expects bringing people with more Green Touch for a Good Life.

Starting from 2006, ECS has been implementing the “ECS Green Competitive Advantage and Quality Plan” and introduced Green Products through 4-stages of non-toxic management; including non-toxic suppliers, non-toxic material, non-toxic manufacturing & processing, and, non-toxic quality controls. Besides, ECS is recognized under the IECQQC080000 Certification in her two major manufacturing sites in China; Golden Elite Technology at Shenzhen and ESZ at Suzhou. That empowers ECS desire of providing end users with HSF (Hazardous Substance Free) products to ensure a quality green life.

As a top-down decision, ECS dedicates to offering clean and environmentally friendly computer products for consumers through product design, purchase, production, sale and services to the 3R environmental objectives – Reduce, Reuse and Recycle. The ECS engineering teams are engaged to create products under a Green concept by size reduction, product longevity, easy disassembly, recycle potential, substance restriction and energy saving. For example, ECS green motherboards apply to the three environmental directives – the WEEE (Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment) promoted by the European Union; RoHS (Restriction on Hazardous Substance Directive) and EuP (Eco design of Energy-using Products Directive).

Nowadays, ECS integrates Green concept in her daily operation. From the headquarters on Taiwan to worldwide branches, ECS practices energy saving, water recycling, Green data center, planting and so on to reduce greenhouse gas emission for mitigating the climate change. With continuous efforts to conduct business in a sustainable way, ECS recognizes that we are dependent on the Earth and strive to improve the quality of life for people everywhere!

Global Network

The headquarters of ECS is located in Taipei Neihu Technology Park. We have offices in major cities around the world. We are committed to product development and expanding the scale of our business. With our branches all over the Americas, Europe, and Asia, ECS localizes sales and retail in order to provide immediate and convenient service for our customers.

-Taipei, Taiwan

-Tokyo, Japan

-Seoul, Korea

-Wijchen, Netherlands

-Fremont, USA

-Moscow, Russia

-Sao Paulo, Brazil

Manufacturing Sites

ECS adopts a vertical integration structure of design, component manufacturing, and system assembly. At present, ECS has established two manufacturing locations; well-developed supply chain capabilities, and well-monitored production links; and the capacity to adapt to the needs of the ever-changing market.

-Golden Elite Technology (Shenzhen), China

-ESZ (Suzhou), China"

Product Features:

 

Product Specifications:

The Z77H2-AX motherboard from ECS is shipped inside a large golden cardboard box, with an interesting drawn logo in the center:

 

 

 

Both enclosure sides open up like a book, only to reveal additional information about the product:

 

 

 

 

The information refers to the layout of the I/O connectors, “Golden” features, some additional information regarding the PCI-E Gen3 technology, switchable graphics, or some charts representing performance differences between this board and the older generations:

 

 

 

 

 

After removing the external packaging, we will see that the board is further protected inside a black cardboard enclosure; the motherboard is not provided with a plastic frame as we have seen at other manufacturers, but wrapped inside an anti-static bag:

 

 

 

As accessories, we can find 3 SLI bridges, the usual USB 3.0 Front Panel connectors that can be also installed in the back with the supplied bracket, a WiFi antenna, connector covers, the I/O Shield and no less than 6 SATA cables:

 

 

 

The I/O Shield is gold plated, something unique and the back of it is covered with a sponge-like material, which acts as a spacer between the shield and the gold plated connectors themselves:

 

 

 

 

Documentation is also included and this is composed from a general assembly manual that could be found at the other products from ECS we have reviewed in the past, an Operation Manual for Virtu MVP and the User’s Guide; a DVD is also included which houses the applications and drivers:

 

 

 

Inside the User’s Guide, we can find the necessary information to set everything up; unfortunately, we cannot find the boot codes at the end of the guide, as ASRock uses to include:

 

 

 

The Operation Manual for Virtu MVP shows the installation steps, but also describes the application interface:

 

 

 

The PCB has a piano black color and combines pretty nicely with the golden heatsinks, golden solid capacitors and chokes; in the center we can find a small heatsink for the PLX PXE 8747, capable of taking 16 PCIe lanes from the Ivy Bridge CPU and is able to support 32 PCIe lanes. The controller is also PCIe Gen 3 compliant; this way, we can install dual card configurations (x16/x16) or triple card (x16/x8/x8):

 

 

 

The board PCH is covered with a larger heatsink, with the Black Extreme logo; the logo is protected by a small transparent protective film:

 

 

 

On the top left side of the PCB, near the 8-pin ATX power connector, we can find the tiny uP1618 6+2 Phase Buck Controller:

 

 

 

The two eSATA 6Gbps ports in the back are supported by the ASMedia ASM1061 controller:

 

 

 

The LAN interface is provided on this board by the Realtek RTL8111E Gigabit Ethernet Controller:

 

 

 

Near it, we can find the Realtek ALC892 7.1+2 Channel HD Audio Codec with Content Protection:

 

 

 

Also, near the second PCI-E x1 slot (counting from top to bottom), we can find the CMOS battery, along with the SuperIO chip:

 

 

 

The ITE IT8893E PCIe-to-PCI bridge chip supplies the PCI interfaces, since the Ivy Bridge chipset does not have any hardware support for them anymore:

 

 

 

The Texas Instruments TUSB7320 USB 3.0 Host Controller supplies the interface for the two Front Panel ports:

 

 

 

On the bottom of the PCB, we can find multiple headers (from right to left):

 

-Front Panel switch/LED header

-Front Panel USB 3.0 header

-Case Open header

-Front Panel USB 2.0 header (with EZ Charger support)

-SPI Debug header -> for factory use

-3-pin System Cooling Fan header

-Onboard Serial Port Header

-SPDIF out header

-Front Panel Audio Header

 

Instead of including the Serial Port Header, we would have wanted an additional of one or two USB 2.0 headers, which are very useful nowadays for connecting additional ports on the front panel, liquid cooling systems (like the Antec 920), intelligent front panel LCDs and so on:

 

 

 

A nice inclusion on the board is the Mini-Serial ATA 3.0 Gb/s port, located in the bottom right corner, where we can plug in a SSD to use as cache; near it we will find the Debug LED display:

 

 

 

Next, we will find 6 SATA ports, two of which are SATA2 and 4 SATA3:

 

 

 

The Power and Reset buttons are lit when the system is operating and are placed conveniently to the right:

 

 

 

A small buzzer is soldered near the PCH heatsink:

 

 

 

The memory slots are all black and near them we will find the 24-pin ATX power connector:

 

 

 

Here there is also an additional 3-pin fan header:

 

 

 

The last fan header can be found on the top portion of the PCB, near the VRM heatsink and the memory slots:

 

 

 

Also, on the top side of the heatsink we can find some measuring points:

 

 

 

The board is equipped with 2 PCI-E x1 slots, 3 PCI-E x16 and 2 PCI; the first two PCI-E x16 slots are carefully placed so we do not have to worry when installing video cards with multiple slot cooling systems:

 

 

 

The VRM is completely covered by a gold plated heatsink, made from two pieces; the capacitors, along with the chokes are also gold plated:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Another interesting piece of the “puzzle” is the CPU socket, which is also gold plated and features a black plastic cover, which must be removed only after the CPU has been installed:

 

 

 

Here is a photo of the open, exposed socket:

 

 

 

The CPU can be installed really easy by following the guides:

 

 

 

The I/O connectors are also gold plated, to preserve the theme from the rest of the board. Besides the integrated Bluetooth dongle and the Wireless LAN dongle (which needs to operate with the supplied WiFi antenna installed in the back), we can also find no less than 4 USB 3.0 ports, 4 USB 2.0 ports, 2 eSATA ports, a LAN port, the Audio ports, the Clear CMOS button and the video out interfaces (VGA and HDMI). It is unknown why the manufacturer has chosen to use an analog VGA interface instead of DVI, considering that we can also use the DVI interface with older monitors by using a DVI to VGA adapter:

 

 

 

The UEFI interface of the Z77H2-AX board from ECS is similar to the one we have seen on their A75F-A motherboard; the setup shows us first a welcome screen, with four buttons in the center from which we can customize the language, load optimized defaults, boot from one of the available devices or load the more advanced UEFI interface. The bottom area gives us information about the UEFI build date, the system date, time, installed CPU and memory:

 

 

 

The Advanced interface is split into multiple tabs which are shown on the top; inside the Main tab, we can customize the UEFI language, the system date along with the time:

 

 

 

The Advanced tab has multiple sub-menus that we can access individually:

 

 

 

The LAN configuration sub-menu allows us to disable or enable the wired LAN interface:

 

 

 

The PC Health Status menu gives us information regarding the installed fan speeds, system live voltages and the CPU temperature offset. In the same menu we can customize fan profiles:

 

 

 

The Power Management Setup menu shows us some of the well known resume options; here we can also specify the power LED type:

 

 

 

Inside the ACPI Settings menu, we can only set the ACPI Sleep State:

 

 

 

The CPU Configuration menu shows us additional information about the CPU features, microcodes and here we will be also able to enable or disable features like Hyperthreading, Intel Virtualization, or set the number of active cores:

 

 

 

The SATA Configuration sub-menu allows us to set the modes for the Z77 chipset, but also for the other controllers on the board:

 

 

 

The USB Configuration menu lets us enable or disable the USB controllers, but also the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth dongles present on the board:

 

 

 

In case we use the Intel Rapid Start Technology Feature, we can enable or disable it in the respective menu:

 

 

 

The Chipset menu is structured the same and comes with three extra sub-menus:

 

 

 

Inside the System Agent Configuration sub-menu, we can set which video adapter we should initialize first, and we can enable or disable the IGD Multi-Monitor feature:

 

 

 

The PCH Configuration menu, will allow picking up the state in case of AC Power loss, and we can also enable/disable the audio interface:

 

 

 

The ME Technology Configuration sub-menu only displays the current FW version:

 

 

 

The M.I.B. X is the section of the UEFI we will use most if we would like to fine-tune the performance of the system; here we can adjust settings regarding CPU overclocking, voltages, memory timings and others; the voltages can be adjusted for many components like CPU, AXG, IMC, DIMM and so on. The CPU Vdroop can be disabled, but we cannot see any LLC levels customization anywhere:

 

 

 

The bottom of the menu shows us again the live voltages for the different components, along with the current CPU and memory frequencies:

 

 

 

The CPU Overclocking Configuration sub-menu allows us to select the CPU Bclk, Ratio or enable/disable important functions like Turbo, Internal PLL Overvoltage:

 

 

 

The Memory Multiplier Configuration menu may be confusing at first, if we leave it on Automatic; in case we switch it on Manual, all the memory settings will be configurable:

 

 

 

 

 

The Boot Configuration tab allows us to set the NumLock boot-up state, type of boot and boot drives priorities:

 

 

 

Inside the Security tab, we will be able to set an Administrator and User password:

 

 

 

Finally, inside the Exit tab we can customize profiles, save/discard settings we have made or load the factory defaults:

 

 

 

Test Setup

 

CPU: Intel I5 3570K Retail

CPU Cooler: Noctua NH-D14

Motherboard: ECS Z77H2-AX Black Extreme

RAM: GeIL Black Dragon 2x4GB DDR2133 (@1600)

Video: Sparkle X560 Calibre

Power Supply: Cooler Master 850W

HDD: Seagate Barracuda 320GB 7200.10

Case: Cooler Master ATCS 840

 

Stability at 4.7GHz could be obtained with a 1.250V value inside the UEFI and Vdroop set on Off; however, in CPU-Z and AIDA64, the reported voltage was closer to 1.3V in Load:

 

 

 

 

With the latest version of AIDA64 utility, we can reveal more information regarding the motherboard, the CPU IMC and the Z77 chipset:

 

Motherboard

 

 

 

Ivy Bridge IMC

 

 

 

Z77 Chipset

 

 

On the installation DVD, we can find multiple other applications from ECS or other vendors; eBLU is an utility which we can use to check if a new UEFI update is available for our board:

 

 

eDLU is in charge of finding the latest drivers for the board; by clicking on “Start”, we will be redirected to the respective web page, on the ECS webpage:

 

 

 

 

 

eOC is the overclocking application from ECS and it’s interface is split in multiple tabs; inside the Monitor tab, we can see the current CPU temperature offset, along with the detected system temperature:

 

 

 

The Easy Tuning tab shows us the voltages and only leaves us to modify the BCLK:

 

 

 

From the Advanced Tuning tab, we can also modify the system voltages; however, there is no setting to modify the CPU ratio:

 

 

 

The final Options tab lets us set the application at startup, load by default a previously saved profile, apply the settings automatically when the application is loaded, or apply the same settings when resuming sleep mode:

 

 

 

eSF is another small program from ECS that lets us adjust the fan speeds:

 

 

 

A widget program is also included on the disk, from where we can see the the CPU operating speed on-the-fly:

 

 

 

A lot of options regarding overclocking and system monitoring can be found inside the supplied Extreme Tuning Utility from Intel:

 

 

 

Trial applications are also included from Cyberlink, and these are:

 

PowerDVD 11

 

 

 

Power2Go

PowerDirector

Synthetic

 

AIDA64 CPU Queen

AIDA64 PhotoWorxx

AIDA64 Zlib

AIDA64 AES

AIDA64 CPU Hash

AIDA64 FPU VP8

AIDA64 FPU Julia

AIDA64 FPU Mandel

AIDA64 FPU SinJulia

Cinebench R10 CPU Score

Cinebench R11.5 CPU Score

CrystalMark

PCMark05 System Suite

PCMark Vantage Suite

PCMark 7

3DMark 2001 Default Run

3DMark 2003 CPU Score

3DMark 2005 CPU Score

3DMark 2006 CPU Score

3DMark Vantage CPU Score

3DMark 11 Performance Score

PerformanceTest 7 CPU

SuperPI 1.5 XS 2MB

wPrime 32M

x264 Encoding

Games

Crysis

Street Fighter 4

Far Cry 2

Dirt 3

Just Cause 2

The board supports the Virtu MVP technology; to download the latest version of the application, we can go ahead and navigate to the Lucid website. The interface has multiple tabs and in the Main one, we can disable or enable the GPU Virtualization feature and set the location/behavior of the In-Game icon:

 

 

 

Virtu MVP is based on two technologies: HyperFormance and Virtual Vsync which can be enabled or disabled from the interface. HyperFormance is meant to remove redundant rendering tasks within the graphics pipeline for improving the overall game performance and frame rate; Virtual Vsync enables us to run the games at higher FPS, with no image tearing artifacts:

 

 

 

The next tab shows us the compatible applications with Virtu MVP; if a game/benchmark is not listed, we can introduce it manually into the list, by clicking on the Add button:

 

 

 

In the About tab, we can see the currently installed application version:

 

 

 

While the monitor was connected to the dedicated VGA card, we have performed some benchmarks to see the performance differences in all available modes:

 

Run 1= HyperFormance Off , Virtual Vsync Off

Run 2= HyperFormance On, Virtual Vsync Off

Run 3= HyperFormance Off, Virtual Vsync On

Run 4= HyperFormance On, Virtual Vsync On

3DMark Vantage

3DMark 11

Crysis

Street Fighter 4

Far Cry 2

Just Cause 2

During testing, we have experienced some issues, meaning that Far Cry 2 was displaying artifacts (a lot of areas were getting black in the surrounding areas) and Just Cause 2 refused to run the benchmark (black screen), even if there were no issues navigating inside the main menus.

The appearance of the new Z77H2-AX Black Extreme motherboard from ECS is surprising and at the same time interesting, considering that we haven’t seen an all-gold appearance of the board from other manufacturers before.

 

Besides the usual bundle that we have found before like the USB 3.0 front panel, ECS has also included some plastic blue port covers to avoid dust accumulation in case we do not use all the connectors at once. The board features Bluetooth and Wi-Fi dongles built-in and plenty of eSATA, USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 ports on the I/O; after installing the Wi-Fi dongle drivers, we may get into the situation that the adapter does not detect any nearby networks; usually, this is solved by connecting the provided Wi-Fi antenna inside the case. Some other manufacturers have chosen to provide an external antenna that we could place anywhere outside the case. This board is also great for multi-GPU setups, thanks to the included PLX chip which allows PCI-E x16 functionality for the first two slots, at the same time.

 

The UEFI interface is intuitive and easy to set up; it is split into two sections, the EZ version and the Advanced one from where we will be able to perform most of the system settings customizations.

 

The PCB layout is nice and clean, but we had also hoped to see some more fan headers available, considering that a lot of cases now feature a large number of fans. In case we use a high performance CPU air cooler, most of the times we will need to power up two fans (push-pull) for it; this leaves us with only one fan header for the case fans, which is not optimal. Secondly, we would have preferred some extra USB 2.0 fan headers (some cases have not two but four ports in the front, so a single header is not sufficient and we could also use a third header for other 5.25’’ devices or water cooling systems).

 

ASRock have recently updated the BIOSes for some of their high-end boards to support Ivy Bridge CPUs; as some of you would know, we have last tested their Z68 Fatal1ty Gen3 board, which had good performances with the 2500K. In a comparison with the Z77H2-AX, both boards traded blows, delivering about the same performance levels, in some cases the ASRock model even winning with some of the benchmark scores. Considering the performance facts, it is not easy to recommend one over the other; if you are just going to build a new system on the LGA1155 platform or you only have a P67 board without Gen3, you could go without any second thoughts straight to Z77 but in the case you already have bought a Z68 Gen3 motherboard and the manufacturer has offered Ivy Bridge support for it, you can as well keep it and only get the new Ivy CPU. However, the Z77 boards have a few benefits like support for higher frequency RAM, USB 3.0 support from the chipset and improved SSD caching technologies.

Still waiting for the MSRP from the manufacturer. When available, the review will be updated accordingly.

UPDATE: As the manufacturer told us, the MSRP for this board is $336.99 without taxes, making it not the most accessible board around.

ECS Z77H2-AX Black Extreme Motherboard Recommended For:

 

 

I would like to thank again to ECS for making this review possible!