First Looks: ECS X79R-AX Black Extreme - The Feature Filled X79 Dark Horse

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First Looks: ECS X79R-AX Black Extreme - The Feature Filled X79 Dark Horse by VR-Zone.com

ECS (Elitegroup Computer Systems) is a Taiwanese electronics firm synonymous with entry level offerings or being the motherboard OEM for brands like HP and IBM. In our labs today is their latest offering – the X79R-AX Black Extreme. Boasting a whopping 12 SATA ports, dual LAN/eSATA, Bluetooth/Wireless LAN connectivity and four PCIe x16 slots for multi-GPU extravagance, we see if it has what it takes to be the X79 motherboard of choice.

Box Front View - with a cloth string carrying handle to take it from the shops



Box Behind - this is one of the most colourful and vibrant boxes we have in our lab



ECS X79R-AX Black Extreme Motherboard Front View - passive cooling and no flamboyant heatpipes.



Motherboard Back View



I/O Panel (A nifty clear CMOS button, 2 eSATA 6gbps from a ASMedia ASM1061, Bluetooth V2.1+EDR/150Mbps Wifi from Atheros AR9271L, 4 SuperSpeed USB 3.0 from a Ti TUSB7340, 2 Gigabit LAN Ports from Realtek RTL8111E controllers and 7.1+2 channel audio from a Realtek ALC892)







Find out more on the next page...

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12 SATA ports (Four 3Gb/s Ports in white and Six 6GB/s Ports in Grey supported from the X79 Patsburg-D Chipset, and 2 additional 6Gb/s Ports from another ASMedia ASM1061)





PORT-80 Diagnostic LED, Power/Reset Buttons - features that we feel should be in all end user DIY motherboards!



PCIe 3.0 compliant ASMedia ASM1480 switches to accomodate the plethora of host devices (the 2nd and 4th PCIe x16 slots run in x8 mode)





CPU Socket Area. Sadly only 4 DIMM slots instead of 8 as seen in all the ASUS boards unveiled so far.





ISL6366 - Dual 6-Phase + 1-Phase PWM Controller for VR12/IMVP



Voltage measuring points below the 24pin ATX connector



Solid Caps and Chokes that are used around the board



Accessories - plenty of SATA cables of many colours!