Computex 2010 Coverage

ClayMeow - July 5, 2010
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ECS

Headquartered in Taipei just a short drive from Computex, ECS (Elitegroup Computer Systems) is best known for its motherboards and video cards. It may surprise you then, that those two parts account for roughly half its business - but more on that later. At CES earlier this year, we saw the unveiling of 15u Gold Contact motherboards, which provide more durability and reliability than standard motherboards using 5u Gold. So what did ECS have in store for us here at Computex? James Lleverino gave Kevin (Neoseeker) and I a personal tour of their fairly large booth, and both of us came away amazed.

One of the main things ECS wanted to show off was a change to its Black Series line of motherboards - a change in color scheme. The PCB remains black while the rest of the components - sockets, slots, etc. - are black, grey and white, instead of the red, orange and yellow of the current boards. Looks are obviously objective, but personally I found the new look far superior to the old look. The new look fits well with the "black" theme and has a clean, professional look. Performance and price are always key factors when purchasing a motherboard, but looks are also extremely important to a lot of people, especially those with windowed or open-air cases, so you'll definitely want to check out the new Black Series boards if you're one of those people. The particular board they had on display with the new color scheme was the P55H-AK, which will sport SATA 6Gb/s and USB 3.0.

The other aesthetic change ECS is making is to its boxes. As you can see in the photos below, the common theme is an angled emblem, resembling a case badge. I think the new design looks pretty sleek. I especially like the dragon on the Black Series.

ECS was also showing off new boards that will support Intel's future 6 Series chipset. As with the P55H-AK, the board will support SATA 6GB/s and USB 3.0, along with 7.1 hi-def audio. If you're an overclocker, you'll want to pay particular interest to the P67H2-A2, which features an easy to use OC dial (middle-left photo) that increases your CPU by set percentages. In the middle-right photo, you can see the I/O panel for that particular board, which shows the 7.1 channel audio jacks, eight USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0 ports, two eSATA 6GB/s ports, two Gigabit LAN ports, and one PS/2 port. You may have also noticed the small black button to the far right of the image - that's the Clear CMOS button. Although it may seem like a minor change, ECS has surrounded it by a casing making it actually take effort to push, unlike on previous boards that invited accidental presses.