H67 – A Triumvirate of Tantalizing Technology

BIOS

Out of the Sandy Bridge chipset UEFI/BIOSes I have seen so far, the ECS implementation, whilst functional, is not breaking any new ground.  In actual fact, it can be a bit of a pig to use.  It is not always obvious where options are for a start.

There is no main screen to see what you have got installed, what voltages are being applied, what temperature it is running at, what DIMMs you have installed, etc.  The best is this screen shown above, which gives the processor, some voltages and total memory.  There is another screen with similar information and the ‘system temperature’, which could either be the CPU, or the Chipset, or an average of the two.

The smart fan options give you Normal/Quiet/Silent/Manual, and all the options above (except CPU Fan Full Speed Offset) can be changed.  There is no high performance option if you want/need the fan on full all the time however.

A lot of the BIOS options are embedded in the Advanced Menu, and in one of the subsequent sub-menus within.  A lot of these sub-menus have a single option or two, meaning that there is constant flicking between them if you want to check every system setting.  Not exactly the best way of organizing a BIOS in my opinion – and seasoned BIOS users are used to pressing F10 on almost all motherboards as the button for ‘Save and Exit’.  ECS have confusingly set this to F4. 

One positive option I like in the BIOS, which is not available in various UEFIs such as the ASRock, is the ability to perform a one-off boot selection from a different device, such as a bootable USB, without having to change the order of the boot devices both before and after what you have done.

Also, as I mentioned previously, there is an oddity with the RAM timings on the board.   If your kit is 1333 MHz C9, then the board will run them at 1333 MHz C9. If your memory is faster than this, it will default to 1333 MHz 8-8-8-24. Also, these timings are unchangeable in the BIOS itself.  While H67 boards will not go above 1333 MHz, usually the sub-timings are interchangeable at least.

Overclocking

Overclocking on the ECS board was difficult, confusing, and initially fruitless.  The i5-2500K we used has an 850 MHz Intel HD 3000 Graphics core, with a Turbo Boost up to 1100 MHz.  However, in the ECS BIOS options, there is very little to change.

If you can find the OC options by going through the MIB III -> Performance Tuning -> Chipset Configuration menus, there are three different options: Current, Ratio, and Voltage.  The Ratio option is obviously the critical one here, but surprisingly it gives options between 17x and 60x but doesn’t tell you what value that multiplier is multiplied by – naturally, we assumed 100 MHz given the bus speed, but this isn’t the case here.  After much testing thinking it was 100 MHz, ECS indirectly have told us that this is multiplied by 50 MHz to give the integrated graphics speed, which is inline with what we saw on the ASRock board.

Putting the multiplier at 28x gave 1400 MHz on the integrated GPU, which ran Metro2033 fine.  All the way up to 34x (1700 MHz) also worked without increasing the voltage, and gave 22.32 FPS for Metro2033.  At 36x (1800 MHz), the OS loaded fine, but then became unstable – upping the Graphics Voltage to 0.1V made this stable, but gave no difference in FPS from 1700 MHz.  At 38x (1900 MHz), again the OS was fine, but still no FPS difference (22.37 FPS) at the same voltage.  To double check nothing was wrong, I upped the Graphics Current from Normal to Max, at which point Metro2033 crashed on its first run.  At 40x, 42x and 44x, the same thing happens – no FPS increase.

This behaviour is similar to the ASRock board, except rather than hitting a maximum and decreasing, the ECS board levels out:

For a ‘Black Series’ moniker on a board, the GPU overclock does well.  Overclock results were:

- Metro2033: 22.33 FPS, up 26.2% from 17.7 FPS
- Dirt2: 32.2 FPS, up 18.95% from 27.07 FPS