ECS X58B-A2 Black Series

Building a rig around Intel's fully-fledged Core i7 ‘Bloomfield' CPUs is an expensive affair because of the high cost of the CPU and motherboard. With the X58B-A2 Black Series board however, ECS has made building a top notch Core i7 rig a little less expensive.

This is thanks to a retail price of just US $199 and, thankfully, what you get for your money is actually quite good. The board features the Intel X58 Northbridge and it is paired with the ICH10R Southbridge. This combination gives the board two PCI-E x16 slots (so you can build a multi-GPU system), six Serial ATA ports along with RAID capabilities as well as two e-SATA ports.

On the overclocking front the X58B-A2 Black Series is somewhat basic. In terms of what's on offer the board allows you to modify CPU, IOH, CPU VTT, DIMM and Southbridge voltages but doesn't allow you to modify the CPU's multiplier ratio or fine tune memory timings. The ranges offered are also somewhat limited; the maximum voltage you can apply to the CPU is 1.6-volts. Other boards offer broader ranges and this helps when it comes to high-frequency overclocks.

The board's layout gave us nothing major to complain about though we suggest ECS move the Serial ATA ports, as fitting a full-length, dual-slot PCI-E card to the first x16 slot covers four of the six SATA ports.

With regards to performance, the Black Series lagged behind all of the X58 boards we've tested to date but by very small margins.