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
Test Setup
| Processor |
Intel Core i5-2500K 4 Cores, 4 Threads, 3.3 GHz (3.7 GHz Turbo) |
| Motherboards | ECS P67H2-A |
| Cooling | Corsair H50-1 |
| Power Supply | Silverstone 1000W 80 PLUS Silver |
| Memory |
G.Skill RipjawsX DDR3-1866 9-10-9 28 4x4GB Kit 1.5V Patriot Viper Xtreme DDR3-2133 9-11-9 27 2x4 GB Kit 1.65V |
| Memory Settings | Auto |
| Video Cards |
XFX HD 5850 1GB ECS GTX 580 1536MB |
| Video Drivers |
Catalyst 10.12 NVIDIA Drivers 268.58 |
| Hard Drive | Micron RealSSD C300 256GB |
| Optical Drive | LG GH22NS50 |
| Case | Open Test Bed - CoolerMaster Lab V1.0 |
| Operating System | Windows 7 64-bit |
| SATA Testing | Micron RealSSD C300 256GB |
| USB 2/3 Testing | Patriot 64GB SuperSonic USB 3.0 |
Many thanks to...
In order to perform the Hydra tests, ECS were very kind enough to send me two of their GTX 580 graphics cards, for this review and future reviews. The ECS NGTX580-1536PI-F contains 512 CUDA cores, running at 770 MHz, with 1536 MB of memory at 1 GHz (4 Ghz effective). These units are currently on sale at Newegg.com for $505 with a warranty of three years for parts, and two years for labor.
Comparison to Previous Results
Where applicable, the results in this review are directly compared to the following chipsets and boards which we have reviewed previously:
Power Consumption
Unfortunately for this power supply we don't have many figures to compare the P67H2-A against, but the ASUS P8Z68-V Pro uses less power in this regard.
CPU Temperatures
The ECS does well in the temperature readings compared to other boards we have tested, especially during HD video playback.
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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.