The Board - Layout

The ECS X79R-AX comes in what is now a standard color scheme for the majority of ECS motherboards; grey metal heatsinks and matching grey and white slots nicely contrast with the black PCB. The layout is clean and simple, with very few distractions, both on the front and the back of the board. The back of the board is populated with a few small MOSFET cooling strips, and there are quite a few protruding pins here and there, but overall the layout is very simple, and we did not notice anything that might interfere with mounting aftermarket cooling, but it's worth noting that like many other Intel X79 Express products, there is quite a bit of VRM circuitry found on the backside just above the socket itself. There's also a bit of VRM circuitry just below the socket on the ECS X79R-AX that users need to be mindful of when installing the board into the case, but it does seem to be far enough out of the way that it won't interfere with aftermarket cooling either.


The socket area is quite cramped, but as with all Intel X79 Express products, this is quite unavoidable. The DIMM slots and VRM are very close by, as is the uppermost PCIe slot, all of which are just millimeters from the huge metal retention mechanism of the LGA-2011 socket. The rear of the socket doesn't seem as cramped, but there are those CPU power phases quite close by, and we can see quite a few surface-mounted components in the middle of the factory-installed backplate, too. Lifting the socket retention mechanism reveals the 2011 pins all neatly aligned, each with a 15 nanometer gold coating to help keep the pins from corroding, and allowing them to retain superior contact with the CPU itself. That gold coating is also found in every expansion slot and every DIMM slot.


The bottom half of the motherboard is filled with six expansion slots; four PCIe 2.0 x16 slots (electrically two x16 slots and two x8 slots. The grey x16 slots will each split eight lanes off to the white slot below it to provide a x8/x8/x8/x8 lane configuration when all four are populated), and the only other slots are two PCIe 2.0 x1 slots. The ECS X79R-AX features four DIMM slots, two on each side of the socket itself, for up to a maximum of 64 GB of memory (4x 16 GB). Each bank of DIMMs has its own a single-phase power delivery system located nearby.


The board's bottom edge carries a full complement of pin headers for everything; from front panel audio to front panel USB 2.0 and USB 3.0. On the southbridge side of the board, we find two USB headers, the onboard ON/OFF and RESET switches, the front panel pin block, and a dual-digit POST display. The rear side has the front panel audio a "COM" port, and a single internal USB 3.0 header. There are a total of five fan headers on the X79R-AX, with the dual CPU_FAN headers supporting PWM control, while the remaining three are all the standard 3-pin type with RPM sense. The five fan headers are broken into three groupings in the BIOS and each grouping can be individually set fan curves as well as offering standard profiled SmartFan functionality.


On the back plate we find at the top the Clear CMOS button, a combo PS/2 mouse and keyboard port tied in with dual USB 2.0 ports, two eSATA ports below four red USB 2.0 ports that have WiFi and Bluetooth integrated, four USB 3.0 ports, a five-port analogue audio panel, a digital optical port, with dual LAN ports rounding everything out. A total of eight SATA 6 Gb/s ports and four SATA 3Gb/s ports are found on the opposite side, with ten of those internal ports driven by the Intel X79 Express chipset. Not many manufacturers offer all ten SATA ports that the Intel X79 Express offers, but ECS does, and there's no fan on the northbridge either, categorically denying any reports that the Intel X79 Express chipset runs hot, or isn't capable of offering that many connections. It's worth noting that ECS does say in the product literature that not all drives will work on the four Serial ATA 6 Gb/s (SAS) ports, but you can use them if you buy the right drives. The remaining two SATA 6 Gb/s ports are driven by an external Asmedia controller, bringing the total drive connectivity up to a total of 12 drives by internal connection. It is 14 total if you count the dual eSATA ports on the rear I/O.