ECS X58B-A Review

The ECS X58B-A delivers a little of the good, the bad and not so much on the ugly. The board is a full featured board that at stock speeds delivers performance on par with some hardware that costs as much as $180 more than the X58B-A. The onboard debug LED is useful for diagnosing no boot conditions and just in case you go too far the CMOS reset button is within easy reach on the I/O panel. The onboard power and reset buttons are easy to use and come in handy on a tech bench when you don't want to spend the time to hook up the front panel connections. Overclocking the ECS X58B-A was a challenge. All of the boards I have looked at were able to hit at least a 200+ MHz bclock without any drama. The ECS was just not going to play nice at this level. No amount of tweaking would get me there, voltages, timings, nada! That's not to say that the ECS X58B-A can't overclock, indeed it can taking my little CO stepping i7 920 up to 3.7GHz running at 185x20. This means that the overclock is just over 1GHz from the ECS X58 solution. The one thing I feel holding it back is that there is a serious drop in voltage to the CPU when loading it heavily. When the CPU core voltage is set to 1.425 in the BIOS, under load I saw as little as 1.35 volts during some serious Prime 95 load testing. The CPU I used in this review runs Prime stable at 4.1GHz with 1.4125 volts.