ECS P67H2-A Review: A visit back to Lucid's Hydra
by Ian Cutress on July 21, 2011 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Lucid
- P67
- ECS
When the ECS P67H2-A was released, it retailed at $290. Now, it's available at Newegg.com for $240, or $190 with the current mail-in rebate (expires 7/31), putting it in the path of the majority of the P67 boards we've reviewed this year.
The board itself performs as you would expect out of the box, but there's nothing special in that. Feature wise, excluding the Hydra for a moment, this board could come in as a good tri-AMD GPU board. The internal SATA port count is a bit low compared to the other boards around in this price range (two rather than four), however that is at the expense of supplying two eSATA 6 Gbps on the I/O panel. The distinct lack of fan headers is also worrying. In contrast, there is an abundance of USB ports on the back (6 USB 2.0, 4 USB 3.0) and headers on board - though unfortunately the USB 3.0 header is obscured by any board length GPUs in the second PCIe x16 slot.
The BIOS needs work, this much is certain. It's not really user friendly - the color scheme could use a nudge, and trying to find overclocking options can be a hassle. There's no easy front screen with all the important information, but it does offer the boot override feature. Inside the box includes a bunch of SATA 6 Gbps locking cables and a USB 3.0 front panel, which is what we'd expect in a product like this.
In terms of performance, this is technically the best Sandy Bridge overclock we've had to test in this year. But the main issue in that regard is that under multi-threaded load, this board slows down to the 43x/44x multipliers. This has been seen on other ECS boards this year, and there hasn't been a BIOS update recently (the last one was in April) to fix it, which is highly unfortunate.
At $190, it's a contender against the ASUS, ASRock, Gigabyte and MSI boards we've had in. The main issue for a lot of people will be the potential lack of support updates, as shown from the ECS website. No proper SLI certification rules out NVIDIA users, as Hydra isn't really up to the job yet. At $240, going for this board may be a stretch, especially as other products can offer more, from both the P67 and Z68 range.
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MWilliamson - Thursday, July 21, 2011 - link
An excellent review Ian; I'm impressed by how many combinations you tested under Hydra. While I'm currently not looking to build another system, I have found Hydra to be an interesting concept, and I'm waiting for it to mature to the point where it is valid for all configurations.What I wished to comment on though, was your comment in the Gaming Benchmarks:
"Metro 2033 is the Crysis of the DirectX 11 world (or at least until Crysis 2 is released)..."
Crysis 2 HAS been released, and has been available since April. Granted at the time of release it did not support DirectX 11, due largely in part to it being launched simultaenously on PC and consoles, a recent patch (released June 27th) has added its DirectX 11 feature set, and another patch increased the texture quality for PC gamers, both of which are actually optional, free upgrades. The most recent version, 1.9, also added a demo level which can be run via the in-game console; personally I have no experience with that side of things, since I played through for the storyline, but it is there, and I'd imagine its something you could add to your benchmarking suite, should it suit whatever your requirements are.
IanCutress - Thursday, July 21, 2011 - link
Many thanks on the update :) Not had much time to play games recently, but at some point I want to update the GPU drivers in my reviews also. Updating GPU drivers essentially removes all previous GPU results, so it might be worth having a look at the games I test as well at the same time.Ian
MWilliamson - Thursday, July 21, 2011 - link
You're most welcome, I had thought that was a possibility :)Igen - Thursday, July 21, 2011 - link
Hard to tell from the pics, but are those heatsinks riveted on? Would make mods/repairs difficult.DanNeely - Thursday, July 21, 2011 - link
The southbridge sink has what look like plastic fasteners; I'd assume they're pushpins of some sort. The moftset/etc sinks are harder too tell because of the angle and not being perfectly in focus, but if you look at the fastener in the lower right on the 5th pic the recessed area shows two indents that look like they're in the right spots to be part of a philips head which is otherwise out of sight. A high resolution vertical image/bottom image would really help.Uritziel - Friday, July 22, 2011 - link
MOFTSET lol! I'm going to start saying that :)Death666Angel - Thursday, July 21, 2011 - link
The green color of the ECS mainboard bars in the graphs for gaming makes little sense here, because then we don't know which resolution was used, as the resolution is identified as the colors. Though of course the higher resolution has most likely the lower fps numbers, it still looks odd. :-)Good review though!
HangFire - Thursday, July 21, 2011 - link
You got 3? Wow. My old ECS C2D board had one (two if you count the CPU).ECS has really moved up over the years.
fausto412 - Thursday, July 21, 2011 - link
this solution is junk.dhiiir - Friday, July 22, 2011 - link
I believe that the best motherboard can be ruined with a terrible BIOS or UEFI. UEFI is pretty cool, but if you can't make a good text only implementation, how the hell are you going to make a passable GUI? I'm perfectly happy with a well designed text based UEFI, but I will admit that as much time as I spend with BIOSs and UEFIs, Asus' slick GUI system is clearly in a class by itself. If I were new to the game, I would want something like that on my first build. There just isn't an excuse for terrible BIOS/UEFIs in the year 2011.I like online shopping,but don't know where have a good store to buy . I have a friend said that a shop is very good. -.www.upsfashion.com- I went. Really good. Things are cheap, fashion,. Owner has a good attitude. I am really happy to buy things there.