The Board - Layout

The ECS GANK MACHINE struts it stuff in red and black, with a hefty helping of golden capacitors everywhere. The board itself is actually pretty complex, making full use of the space available on its standard ATX format. This then has pins sticking out all over the place on the rear of the board.


Looking at the socket from an angle, the heatsink is shaped like a shark, with a wire coming out of its mouth, which you unfortunately do not really see by looking at the board directly—I had to laugh a bit. GANK MACHINE? Shark-shaped heatsink? The designers at ECS definitely have a sense of humor. The rear of the socket is actually pretty open, with clear demarcations for purposefully designed backplate clearance.


There are only five expansion slots on the ECS GANK MACHINE—gamers buy dual-slot VGAs, so there's no slot under the top two CPU-connected PCI-E slots; slots that would typically go unused because of common VGA designs for this market segment. There are three PCI-E x16 slots that connect to the CPU, electrically wired in Intel's standard configurations of x16 at the top, x8/x8 in the upper two when the top two are used, and x8/x4/x4 when you populate all three. The quartet of DIMM slots support DIMMs of up to 8 GB in density, each, for a total of 32 GB, with a somewhat interesting bit to its slot design I will talk about in a moment.


The bottom edge of the ECS GANK MACHINE has the usual 4-pin headers, but there is also a whole bunch of other stuff here on its right edge, buttons and such, so you can use these for overclocking or whatever else you use such buttons for nowadays.


Right above the buttons is a mSATA slot, connected to the Intel Z87 PCH, so you could use it with an inexpensive 60 GB drive for HDD caching, which is built into the chipset itself. Just something for those gamers with huge gaming libraries who aren't interested in spending thousands of dollars on SSD storage, but still want the fast loading-times SSDs can offer. Oh, and there are three fan headers. Yeah, three, and that is all—CPU fan, front fan, and rear fan. You do not really need more than that, do you?


Here is a picture of the place you plug everything into—USB, dual LAN, HDMI, audio, etc. There are a couple of eSATA ports too, but I think those are useless. I would rather use internal SATA headers and the ECS GANK MACHINE has seven of those, with the additional two being driven by a Marvell controller. They are all also pretty clearly labeled, and although I've kind of covered everything the board has here, the fact that I had to mention these SATA ports being so nicely labeled hints at ECS's attention to detail, which can't be ignored. Honestly, nobody expects this sort of stuff from ECS, yet here it is.