As you could see on the first page, the chipset supports six SATA-300 ports and all are present on the reviewed board, supporting RAID levels 0, 1, 5, 10 and JBOD. GeForce 9300 chipset does not have parallel ATA ports, but ECS added a JMicron JMB361 chip to make one ATA-133 port available. This chip also controls the eSATA port available on the rear panel from the motherboard.

This motherboard has an eight-channel on-board audio with all necessary jacks for you to connect an eight-channel analog speaker system. This motherboard provides digital audio on the HDMI output, which is a great feature to have. However in order to use the digital audio output you will need to have a home theater receiver with HDMI input with digital audio extraction capability. Not all home theater receivers have an HDMI input and not all receivers that have HDMI input are capable of extracting audio from there. So it would be really nice if this motherboard had at least an on-board coaxial SPDIF output, just in case your home theater equipment isn’t capable of extracting digital audio from the HDMI output, especially since this motherboard is clearly targeted to HTPC market.

The audio codec used is Realtek ALC883, which features a 95 dB output signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and a 85 dB input signal-to-noise ratio, with 24-bit resolution and up to 192 KHz sampling rate for its outputs and up to 96 KHz sampling rate for its inputs. While the output noise level is decent for the mainstream user, people working professionally with analog audio capture and editing will be better off with a different motherboard or will have to buy an add-on sound card, as 85 dB is simply too low and will produce a lot of white noise on your work.

This motherboard features one Gigabit Ethernet port, which is controlled by the chipset, requiring only a small chip to make the physical layer interface.

On Figure 4 you can see the rear panel of the motherboard. There you will find one mouse PS/2 connector, one keyboard PS/2 connector, VGA output, HDMI output, six USB 2.0 ports, one eSATA port, one Gigabit Ethernet port and 7.1 channel analog audio outputs. As you can see there is no parallel port on the motherboard. One serial port is available thru 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. Like other members from ECS’ “Black Series” 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), plus it has passive heatsinks on top of the MOSFET transistors from this section. The capacitors used on the rest of the motherboard, however, are regular electrolytic caps from OST, a Taiwanese company.

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

Another nice feature is the presence of the power and reset switches soldered directly on the motherboard, see Figure 6.

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Figure 6: Power and reset switches.

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