ECS X79R-AX (Black Extreme) Review
by Ian Cutress on January 13, 2012 12:30 PM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- ECS
- X79
Every time I come across an ECS board, I'm not sure what to expect. ECS is a company with roots firmly in the pan-Asia OEM market, and their consumer/enthusiast lines account for a small percentage of their total revenue. One would assume therefore that their consumer lines aren't perhaps top priority when it comes to production. Nevertheless, they are pushing more at consumer lines with products like the X79R-AX.
In summary, the good - three year warranty (3 years parts, 2 years labor), on board WiFi, twelve SATA ports, dual NICs, Bluetooth, Power/Reset/Debug LED, working fan controls, one-button OC results, in-the-box bundle contains a lot of SATA cables and a USB 3.0 front panel.
The bad - NICs are Realtek and I'm sure some users would have preferred Intel, only 4 DIMM slots rather than 8, Realtek ALC892 audio rather than the ALC898 used by other products in this price range, most overclocking methods with the 12/26/2011 BIOS are not working, runs a little hotter than its competitors, software hasn't changed much in a few years, limited failed overclock recovery.
Personally, I like the feature set of this board, and if you're reading in January 2012, ECS currently have a mail-in rebate scheme in place making this board a penny under $260, which could positively be eyed as a bargain. Wifi, dual NIC, twelve SATA ports, working fan controls, nice OC - if I had a spare Sandy Bridge-E processor, this would probably be my home system right now. At its usual MSRP of $309.99, I can compare it to a couple of boards I've already tested - the Intel DX79SI (MSRP $300) and the ASUS P9X79 Pro (MSRP $330). Without going into significant detail, the ECS board is preferential to the Intel board I tested, both in terms of features and performance. If you read my ASUS review, I gave the P9X79 Pro a rare AnandTech Silver reward, due to innovation of the X79 concept. Pitching the ECS against the ASUS at $310 vs. $330 results in a win for the ASUS - but at $260 for the ECS with the current rebate scheme, it's a tough choice and down to the individual and how they feel about each manufacturer.
If this ECS board was rock solid out of the package, I'd have to give it a Silver Award for the combination of features and price, without a doubt. Unfortunately, the BIOS still needs work on the OC, the software could do with an update, and some of the more premium onboard features were cut down (Audio, DIMMs, Ethernet controllers), presumably for market segmentation and to save on board cost. But stick in 16 GB, put it on the working auto-OC setting, a couple of GPUs and up to 12 SATA drives, connect to your home wireless, and I can imagine you would have a nice and happy system at your fingertips. For that, I'd have to at least give the board a recommendation, and at the rebate price, an Anandtech Bronze Award.
ECS X79R-AX (Black Extreme)
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theangryintern - Monday, January 16, 2012 - link
I fell victim to their low prices a few times, and every time it was a complete crap product. I've had a few friends that have had nothing but trouble with their products as well. Definitely one company I will stay way away from and I never recommend their products to anyone I know.darwiniandude - Sunday, January 15, 2012 - link
I built an 'el cheapo box in late 2001 based around an ECS K7S5A motherboard, SiS chipset, AMD cpu, it was the cheapest of the cheap at the time. Was mostly used as an office machine, but it's never had any hardware replaced until I replaced it with something good a few months ago. Was mostly on 24/7.Obviously, I'm sure this the exception rather than the rule, but I was still pretty impressed.
LoneWolf15 - Sunday, January 15, 2012 - link
The K7S5A wasn't a bad board --provided you got a good one. The design was fair --the quality control, like many other ECS products, was all over the map.I'm sure ECS can design an okay board, should they choose to do so. However, one segment of their production is cut-rate low-cost boards (which does nothing to inspire confidence) and if you combine that with inconsistent quality control, I don't trust their top-end stuff based on the other things they make.
MSI, Gigabyte, and others have much higher consistency in quality control even in their value $70-100 mainboards.
JediJeb - Sunday, January 15, 2012 - link
I am currently using one of the ECS L7S7A2 motherboard, matter of fact posting from it right now. It isn't and extreme overclocker but I have been running my AthlonXP2400M overclocked from 1.8ghz to 2.3ghz for the last 6 years or so 24/7. Before that I was using an ECS K7S5A which ran for several years overclocked until it was hit by lightening and popped one of the MOSFETs. I guess I have been one of the lucky ones to get two good boards in a row.DanNeely - Monday, January 16, 2012 - link
What a lot of people nursing grudges from a decade+ back fail to acknowledge is that when the number of board makers consolidated heavily in the early part of the last decade that the surviving companies with bad engineering reps were able to gobble entire design teams from companies that produced quality products but didn't have enough volume to sustain themselves in the market with the result that even the budget brands now have decent hardware quality.Nfarce - Monday, January 16, 2012 - link
Glad I'm not the only one who thinks ECS is crap. Made the mistake of buying one at Fry's several years ago for a buddy's E8400 build. Worst mobo I've ever bought since my first build during the Pentium II days. ECS has always been the cheap mobo, and the very idea of them coming off with a $300+ X79 is laughable. Fool me once, shame on me...popej - Friday, January 13, 2012 - link
This could work at office PC, but i doubt if enthusiasts would buy motherboard with no expansion capability.MrTeal - Friday, January 13, 2012 - link
Maybe not, but even for most enthusiasts 16GB shows little or no benefit over 8GB. By the time the you start wanting 32GB you'll probably be wanting Haswell-E or 32GB of DDR4 anyway.Nihility - Friday, January 13, 2012 - link
I disagree.My PC almost always uses 7.5 GB out of the available 8 GB. And I have to constantly close programs to make sure my system doesn't begin swapping.
Maybe 12 is enough, but 8 is not enough.
cjl - Friday, January 13, 2012 - link
What on earth are you doing where that much memory is in constant use? Either you have an enormous memory leak in several programs, or you are a very atypical user.That having been said, I would say that a SNB-E system should be built with at least 16GB (4x4GB), since 4GB RAM sticks aren't that expensive these days. A case could even be made for 32GB (4x8GB), since even 8GB sticks aren't that bad, and SNB-E is likely to be used primarily by pretty heavy users anyways.