ECS X79R-AX (Black Extreme) Review
by Ian Cutress on January 13, 2012 12:30 PM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- ECS
- X79
In The Box
The box bundle, while substantial, has positive points and negative points. What we have in the box is 12 SATA cables (two with right angled heads), a USB 3.0 front or rear panel with room for an SSD, a long flexible SLI connector, and the usual internals such as IO panel, driver CD and manuals. Two things to note - other competitors usually include more SLI connectors, and the USB 3.0 front panel cable isn't that long, such that in dual GPU mode it would only be suitable for the bottom of the front of the case, or as a rear USB 3.0 panel.
Image courtesy of Newegg
Board Features
| ECS X79R-AX (Black Extreme) | |
| Size | ATX |
| CPU Interface | LGA2011 |
| CPU Support | Intel Second Generation Core i7 Sandy Bridge E |
| Chipset | Intel X79 |
| Base Clock Frequency | 99.8 MHz |
| Core Voltage | Default, -300 mV to +700 mV |
| CPU Clock Multiplier | Auto, 12x to 1000x |
| DRAM Voltage | Auto, -300 mV to +500 mV |
| DRAM Command Rate | Auto, 1N to 3N |
| Memory Slots |
Four DDR3 DIMM slots supporting up to 32 GB Up to Quad Channel Support for DDR3, 1067-2400 MHz |
| Expansion Slots |
2 x PCIe Gen 3 x16 2 x PCIe Gen 3 x8 2 x PCIe x1 |
| Onboard SATA/RAID |
2 x SATA 6 Gbps, Support for RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 4 x SATA 3 Gbps, Support for RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 4 x SATA 6 Gbps (labelled SAS), support for RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 |
| Onboard |
4 x SATA 3 Gbps (PCH) 8 x SATA 6 Gbps (2 PCH, 4 'SAS', 2 Controller) 5 x Fan Headers 1 x 4-pin Molex CFX/SLI Power Connector 1 x SPDIF Out Header 1 x Front Panel Header 1 x Front Panel Audio Header 2 x USB 2.0 Headers 1 x USB 3.0 Header 1 x COM Header 1 x Clear CMOS header Power/Reset Buttons + Debug LED |
| Onboard LAN | Dual RealTek RTL 8111E Gigabit Lan |
| Onboard Audio | Realtek ALC892 |
| Power Connectors |
1 x 24-pin ATX connector 1 x 8-pin 12V connector 1 x 4-pin Molex CFX/SLI Power Connector |
| Fan Headers |
2 x CPU Fan Header (4-pin) 1 x SYS Headers (3-pin) 2 x PWR Headers (3-pin) |
| IO Panel |
1 x PS/2 Mouse and Keyboard Port 1 x Wireless LAN 1 x Bluetooth 6 x USB 2.0 4 x USB 3.0 2 x eSATA 6 Gbps 2 x Gigabit Ethernet Audio Jacks |
| BIOS Version | 26/12/2012 |
| Warranty Period | 3 Years |
Again, the ECS has a few positive and negative points with the board features as well. While we have dual gigabit Ethernet, some users may not enjoy they fact that they are Realtek, rather than the Intel NICs we see on almost all the major competitor boards. One other point of contention is that there are only four DIMM slots for one per channel, rather than eight DIMM slots for two per channel, or that the board uses the Realtek ALC892 rather than the ALC898 that all the other boards at this price range use. But I really like the fact that for this price, we can get an X79 board with onboard WiFi, Bluetooth, dual NICs, and twelve SATA ports and still enough space for dual/quad GPUs. It's a combination you will not see on many other products.
Software
Ever since I started reviewing ECS boards, such as P67 and Fusion, there has not been much change in the software available, thus I won't go into detail on many of the specifics, but the package includes at least one gem in their fan controls.
eSF (SF for Smart FAN) controls the SYS headers on the board, allowing for hysteresis in the fan settings. This is a feature we don't see on other boards (ASUS controls are pretty good in comparison for multi-point curves, but don't do hysteresis), and it definitely worked for ECS when I tested it.
Other software onboard is eOC (OC for OverClock), which gives user control of the BCLK and the voltages. This is still software used for older chipsets, as we don't have access to changing the CPU multiplier, or that modern CPUs go into various power states and voltages depending on load, meaning that the CPU voltage selections in eOC can fluctuate wildly. I wouldn't touch the voltages with this tool if I were an end user, in case I accidentally set 1.4 V in an idle state and it then added another +300 mV for a loaded state.
The two other parts of the package are eBLU, a BIOS Live Update tool, and eDLU, a tool which links to the webpage with all the latest drivers.
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PhoenixEnigma - Sunday, January 15, 2012 - link
Agreed.When I see an Anandtech Editor's Choice award, I expect whatever product is to be substantially above average in most, if not all, regards. They're pretty rare, and carry a good deal of weight in my eyes.
Seeing something like this be given one devalues that. Performance is middling at best, expandability is mixed, warranty is below average, and the EFI appears to be a steaming pile of crud - even clearing CMOS is faulty!
It's a cheap board (if you trust the MIR), but it seems to be in both price and quality, corners have been cut all over. Short of Ian verifying those are indeed SAS ports, I have a hard time imagining how this is "Editor's Choice" better than, say, the GA-X79-UD3 - which doesn't need a MIR to hit the same pricepoint.
IanCutress - Sunday, January 15, 2012 - link
This is only the second award I've given in twelve months over 20+ reviews - the other being the ASUS P9X79 Pro. After testing the board, I'd be happy to stick it into a system, use the one button 4.5 GHz overclock and leave it there, and still have access to 12 SATA ports (I should add ECS doesn't guarantee SAS compatibility with these, for all intents and purposes they are best left to be used as SATA), dual gigabit Ethernet, Wifi and Bluetooth. The GA-X79-UD3 you mention in comparison has 6 SATA ports, a single Ethernet port, no Wifi or Bluetooth, a comparatively worse automatic overclock system, not a full range of fan controls and perhaps questionable software.Editor's Choice awards aren't there just for the biggest, best and brightest - otherwise we'd be putting them on every board at the highest price point that checked all the boxes. They're meant for hardware that as a reviewer, I'd happily use, and it ticks all my boxes. These may not be the same boxes as yours, sure, but a board that caters for one group of users may not suitable for another group, meaning that I have to levy my judgement over my experiences with what I'm happy with.
This is why I've given so few over the past 12 months - the ECS board has been given a Bronze award while the rebate is in place, as the price is a big factor given the comparison to other products. I've yet to give a gold award at all, because no one board I've seen has been a perfect (features, performance, price) must buy. You may disagree with my choice to give this ECS board an award, which is your right. But in my opinion, after testing the board and conversing back and forth on some of the finer points with ECS, that it deserves one at the $260 price point.
kloudykat - Sunday, January 15, 2012 - link
Back in April 2009, I was building a new system.I scanned newegg and eventually settled on a brand new "enthusiast" motherboard from ECS.
It was the ECS BLACK SERIES X58B-A, the 1366 chipset one.
I bought it because I had built a few pc's for other people using ECS boards, so I knew it would work.
Here are the other components if anyone is interested:
Intel Core i7-920 Bloomfield 2.66GHz LGA 1366 130W Quad-Core Processor
G.SKILL 6GB (3 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10666) Triple Channel Kit
BFG Tech BFGEGTX260MC896OCE GeForce GTX 260
CORSAIR Enthusiast Series CMPSU-650TX 650W Power Supply
Pioneer DVD Burner
Bunch of hard drives, 1x 360 gb main drive, 2x 1.5TB and 1x 1TB storage drives
Once I got it all installed, I found I was unable to overclock it at all.
Now I am not an OC king or anything, but I have managed to successfully OC some systems in the past.
No matter what I attempted to do in the BIOS, manual or auto OC, it would fail to boot.
With that said, if I left it alone and kept it at the stock frequencies, it worked great. It still works great.
Heck, I am posting this on it right now.
But what rubbed me the wrong way was that ECS marketed this as an OC friendly board, when in reality, it was nothing of the sort.
I agree with Ian, the bios OC options are confusing as hell, at least on my board.
I made sure to update to the latest BIOS and that didn't help anything.
I even made it a point to contact ECS customer support for assistance.
I followed the guidelines they emailed me and it still didn't work.
When I contacted them again to inquire about replacement/money back/etc, I was told basically tough luck.
Ok, thats it. That is my 2 cents. So yeah, I agree with you Ian. It is a good board. I have used it as my
main pc for 3 almost 4 years in a row. It has done nothing but good things for me. I just hope that
you have better luck out of this model than I did out of mine.
AlexIsAlex - Monday, January 16, 2012 - link
What would be nice, in motherboard reviews, would be a measure of the cold boot (POST) time. This is something that different bioses can be differentiated on, and UFEI offers the potential for very fast boots if manufacturers take advantage of it properly.Would it be possible to report, for comparison, the time between the power button being pressed and the installed bootloader starting? I was thinking it might be easiest to measure this by having no OS on the boot media and measuring the time to the "please insert boot media" message, but I'm sure you can think of other ways of doing it.
DanNeely - Tuesday, January 17, 2012 - link
I'd like to second this request, and that it include both normal and overclocked times. My current LGA1366 system spends almost half its boot time posting and half loading the OS from my SSD. (20s power to beep, 10s beep to appearance of OS loading screen, 20s more to login). At stock speeds the first interval is less than half as long.Lugaidster - Tuesday, January 17, 2012 - link
I wonder why boot time is not included given that it should be affected by the firmware. At least I would expect bigger differences than the results on the computation benchmarks.