The Board - A Closer Look

ECS's focus on meeting the needs of gaming enthusiasts is clear and concise, as evidenced by the “LEET GAMING” branding they have now adopted. Even the PCH cooler had a LEET GAMING logo affixed to the top of its numerous shark fins protruding out of the heatsink.


ECS uses a couple ASMedia ASM1061 controllers to provide the additional driver support. I also noticed that there are LEDs behind each of the internal SATA ports to indicate which ports are in SATA 6 Gb/s mode. I thought they might just indicate which ports are in use, but my testing hardware includes different drive interfaces, and only the SATA 6 Gb/s drives made those LEDs light up.


The audio portion of the ECS GANK MACHINE is actually a pretty complex circuit for onboard audio as a standard Realtek ALC1150 CODEC is paired with an ALC5505 DSP to aid in signal quality.


Both LAN ports are driven by Realtek 8111G controllers, a newer, smaller controller that has proven to be pretty reliable. It still isn't a by enthusiasts much preferred Intel controller, but does deliver fairly equal performance nonetheless.


The single PCI port, for those that like to use PCI soundcards or other PCI-based legacy devices, is provided by an ITE IT8893 PCIe-PCI bridge chip. Together, these host features gamers have asked for, all rolled into a single design that clearly exemplifies ECS's focus on meeting their customer's needs in a new way—I like it!