The Board - A Closer Look

The board's BIOS ROM is located just below the included onboard speaker and to our dismay, is not fitted into a socket, but soldered directly to the motherboard itself. This may prove to not be an issue, but as reviewers tend to push memory to the max quite often, BIOS corruption is something very familiar. Should such things happen, the entire board must be sent in for repair, rather than just a little ROM being replaced. Just above the Front Panel connector sits the Advanced Dual Display Indicator, a dual-digit display which functions as a POST code display, useful when troubleshooting boot issues. The manual includes a full listing explaining the codes the display shows during the boot-up process. The dual nature of the display means it serves to report system temperature after the system has passed the POST test, enabled by a switch in BIOS. ECS has made it very simple to recognize that your P67H2-A2 has the latest P67 chipset onboard, signified by the logo on the box we saw earlier, as well as with the sticker you see above, next to the DIMM slots, making it quick and easy to spot.


Although not a lot of information is to be found online about the ISL6364, our experience says that it is responsible for controlling the board's CPU power phases, and the current they provide. This same chip is found on many P67 motherboards released so far, therefore while information is hard to come by, clearly this is nothing other than a controller designed with the Socket 1155 and Intel's VRD12.0 power specification in mind. The CPU VRM itself, with the heat sinks removed, reveals to be comprised of few parts and does have fewer phases than the other boards we have recently tested. The ECS P67H2-A2 features only eight total CPU power phases, each terminated with a grey ferrite-core choke, with "MAGIC" printed on top in yellow ink? Perhaps this “MAGIC” is a trick up this board's sleeve?


For Super I/O functionality, we find a chip with perhaps the wrong sticker on it, responsible for temperature and voltage monitoring as well as fan control. From our previous preview, we had identified this chip as an ITE IT8728F, a part used quite often on other products. The ITE 8893E PCIe to PCI bridge provides support for the two included PCI slots, with both chips being a pair well suited to complement each other.


The included Realtek ALC892 HD codec supports 7.1+2 audio, and meets Microsoft's WLP3.x audio requirements. Using DACs that output a 97 db SNR, and ADCs with a 90 db SNR, it supports 44.1k/48k/96k/192 kHz sampling at 16-, 20- and 24-bit, including full support for HD audio formats featuring Content Protection, providing supporting software is used. It is also DirectSound 3D compatible, so no area of usage or functionality is overlooked. ECS has also sourced the LAN controllers for the ECS P67H2-A2 from Realtek; both are RTL8111E PCIe parts, with one just below the back panel ports near the board edge, with the other located just under the bottom edge of the VRM heat sink.


We find two identical Etrontech USB3.0 controllers on the ECS P67H2-A2; one on the board edge near the rear ports, the second on the other side of the board, directly under the south bridge. Both are the same EJ168A model, which we have found to be both reliable, and fast.


ECS has PCIe-based Marvell 88SE9128B1 chipsets running all the extra SATA 6 Gb/s ports, eSATA and internal SATA included. The controller used for eSATA 6 Gb/s support is near the top left of the board, by the CPU EPS 12v connector, and the controller for the internal SATA 6 Gb/s ports is located directly behind the ports on the right side of the board. As we have mentioned before on other Marvell SATA 6 Gb/s products, these controllers feature an integrated ARM CPU to create true hardware-based RAID functionality.


The final items are the board cooling, both for the CPU power area, and the board's P67 chipset. The MOSFET heat sink is composed of two separate large elements connected via two heatpipes, to help prevent hotspots around the socket. While quite tall in stature, its size ensures that adequate cooling is provided in even the most unfriendly environments. The same can be said of the Southbridge heat sink, with many fins to increase overall surface area, it's more than capable of cooling the chipset, even when hidden from direct airflow by installed expansion cards. With the coolers removed, upon close inspection, we noticed that there was very little contact in the middle of one of the MOSFET heatsink's surfaces, however, the thermal interface pad used did make contact with all vital parts. The other surface of the MOSFET cooler has excellent contact, which is exactly what we like to see. But that's not all, click the next page to get a look at the BIOS.