P67 $190 Part 2: MSI P67A-GD65, ASRock P67 Extreme6 and ECS P67H2-A2

ECS P67H2-A2: Board Features

ECS P67H2-A2: In The Box

• 8 SATA Connectors with locking
• USB 3.0 3.5” Front Panel with rear bracket option
• 3 Port SLI connector
• I/O Shield
• 4 Plastic USB protectors

I have a strong feeling that a USB front panel will become the de facto addition for motherboards in the future—a lot of Cougar Point consumer offerings are starting to provide one. Supplying 8 SATA connectors also earns ECS some plus points.

ECS P67H2-A2: Software

A lot of the software available for the ECS P67H2-A2 is the same as what we saw with the ECS H67H2-M with a couple of exceptions—the overclocking utility eOC, and a power saving utility eGS.

eOC

In terms of what we’ve seen from other OS overclocking utilities from other manufacturers, eOC is pretty low down on the ladder to begin with—that’s even before you realize that it’s an old hash from the socket 775 software and that to get it to work requires some effort!

The main page is just a simple temperature monitor for the CPU and System temperatures. What surprises me here is that the CPU temperature is measured in terms of PECI, or the number of degrees before the CPU is throttled due to thermal limitations, rather than an absolute value. I wouldn’t trust it with a barge pole to be honest, and I’d use free temperature monitor software.

The Easy Tuning tab offers voltages and a CPU Frequency slider, allowing you to adjust BCLK. This slider is the throwback from socket 775 days, when BUS frequencies could reach several hundred MHz—as such, it offers between 100 MHz and 800 MHz (!) in 1 MHz intervals. A Sandy Bridge processor in reality can manage a few MHz due to its integrated clock generator subsystem, but not several hundred! When I initially played with this option, it wouldn’t work—regardless of how this is set, clicking "Apply" would attempt to apply the new clock frequency, and fail. Even when set and the OS is restarted, it would stick at 100 MHz. After contacting ECS, it turns out you need to apply two obscure BIOS options—both ‘ICC Set Clock Enables’ and ‘Send ICC Lock Registers’, and then the eOC software will apply a BCLK, as long as the machine stays stable. As we’re limited to per MHz values, it’s pretty coarsely grained. Also, any change here directly changes the values in BIOS.

The Advance Tuning menu gives you reigns over the voltages on offer. Amazingly, these settings work. Maybe I shouldn’t be amazed—if they’re on offer, they should work anyway, because this is what we pay for. The issue here is with the CPU voltage—on idle, the CPU will flicker between various low state voltages, and this slider value will flicker too. So if you want to select 1.2 V, you need to make sure what state the CPU is in at the time and apply it at the right moment. If a high voltage is selected at a low CPU state, you could end up with a potentially damaging high voltage in a full CPU load scenario.

The Options menu, apart from the spelling mistake, doesn’t really do much, apart from enabling a saved eOC to enable itself at bootup.

eGS

The eGS software is automatically set to ‘auto’ mode, but gives options of ‘Normal’ or ‘Power Saving’ mode. When we selected Power Saving mode, at idle the CPU voltage was reduced to below 0.75V, but at full load there was no difference in voltage between Normal and Power Saving. The background turned a nice red, however.

eBLU

The BIOS live update utility works rather well, automatically detecting if a newer BIOS is available and performing the update.

eDLU

The driver update tool is disappointing—pressing Start just takes you to the webpage relevant to your motherboard and operating system. Here, we’d want a list of drivers currently installed, their versions, an option to automatically search and apply new driver updates at the flick of a button. This is ultimately a cheap way out to say that this tool is supplied.

eSF

Arguably one of the highlights of this motherboard is its fan control. In the OS, the eSF software allows the user to change the CPU and SYS fan speeds and temperature controls. This works very well on the predefined settings, and even better on the custom setting.

eJiffy

The eJiffy software is a quick-boot technology which loads the user into a simple Linux interface through which they can access the web. Loading into eJiffy is very quick compared to an SSD and Windows combination, and gives a simple Mozilla type web browser, suitable for when a user wants nothing more than to browse. We covered eJiffy in more detail in our H67 ECS review as it is a pretty neat addition and we rather like it—read here for more details.