As you could see on the first page, the chipset supports six SATA-300 ports. On this motherboard five SATA-300 ports are available and the sixth port was installed on the rear panel as an eSATA-300 port. With the number of users using external hard disk drives based on eSATA connection increasing every day we think the addition of an eSATA port on this motherboard was more than adequate and a rare feature to see on entry-level models.

This motherboard has an eight-channel on-board audio with individual analog jacks for each output, so the mic in and line in jacks aren’t shared with other functions, not requiring you to reinstall plugs when wanting to use a mike. The only thing we really missed on this motherboard was at least one on-board coaxial SPDIF output. Since this motherboard has HDMI output for allowing you to connect your PC directly to HDTV sets, we think that having at least one on-board SPDIF output is imperative for media center PCs. The manual doesn’t mention if the motherboard routes digital audio to the HDMI output and unfortunately we couldn’t test this feature.

The audio codec used is an IDT 92HD206, which features a 95 dB output signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and a 90 dB input signal-to-noise ratio, with 24-bit resolution and up to 192 kHz sampling rate, which isn’t bad at all for an entry-level motherboard.

This motherboard also features a Gigabit Ethernet port controlled by a Realtek RTL8111B chip.

In Figure 4, you can see the rear panel of the motherboard. There you will find mouse PS/2 connector, keyboard PS/2 connector, VGA output, HDMI output, six USB 2.0 ports, one eSATA-300 port, one Gigabit Ethernet port and complete independent 7.1 channel analog audio outputs. As you can see there are no serial or parallel ports on the rear of the motherboard. One serial port is available through an I/O bracket that doesn’t come with the board.

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Figure 4: Rear connectors.

This motherboard also provides other smaller yet important features. The voltage regulator circuit uses ferrite chokes (which present a lower power loss compared to the iron chokes traditionally used on this circuit) and solid aluminum capacitors (which prevent the infamous capacitor leakage problem). Unfortunately the capacitors used on the rest of the motherboard are traditional electrolytic caps (on the sample we’ve got one cap was from TK, a Japanese manufacturer, and all others were from OST, a Taiwanese manufacturer). It is clear that ECS is increasing the quality of their products, at least on some series. 

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Figure 5: Voltage regulator circuit featuring ferrite chokes and solid capacitors.

Other smaller feature is the presence of a power and a reset switch soldered on the motherboard, which helps a lot while you are building or troubleshooting a PC.

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Figure 6: On-board power and reset switches.

Before going to our benchmarking, let’s recap the main features from this motherboard.