ECS X79R-AX Motherboard Review

[siopao1984]

---

ECS isn't usually the first brand name that springs to mind when considering an enthusiast motherboard despite being one of the largest motherboard manufacturers. Up for review today we have the X79R-AX, one of the most feature rich X79 motherboards available. Let's see if it can go toe to toe with the big boys and put itself on the shortlist of the hardcore enthusiast.

Read more: ECS X79R-AX Motherboard Review by VR-Zone.com

[siopao1984]

Introduction



ECS isn't usually the first brand name that springs to mind when considering an enthusiast motherboard despite being one of the largest motherboard manufacturers. Up for review today we have the X79R-AX, a part of their premium Black edition range and one of the most feature rich X79 motherboards available. Let's see if it can go toe to toe with the big boys and put itself on the shortlist of the hardcore enthusiast.

Before we go into the X79R-AX, we begin with a general overview of the Socket 2011 platform supporting second generation Intel Core I7 processors. Quad channel memory support and more PCIe lanes are the major improvements over the mainstream Sandy Bridge platform.

The ECS X79R-AX brings more than these specs would suggest. It adds features such as integrated WiFi, Bluetooth and no doubt the most interesting feature: four Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) ports resulting in twelve SATA ports plus another pair of eSATA ports on the back panel.



Specifications of the ECS X79R-AX

[siopao1984]

A Closer Look at the ECS X79R-AX

We'll start by taking a look at the box and accessories of the X79R-AX. The box is quite compact, only a tiny bit larger than the board itself. There's an internal cardboard buffer so the package is very solid and well protected from careless couriers.



Like most motherboard boxes, the rear is crammed full of the features ECS wants you to take note of. And what a load of features there are as we'll soon see.



Below is a pic of the accessories that come with the board. There is also a user manual not in this picture as I seem to have misplaced it! The manual comes with a complete list of POST codes filling several pages which is good to see.

Given this is a quad crossfire and SLI capable board, we'd like to see a bit more in the way of multi GPU bridges. We get no less than twelve SATA cables which is impressive! The small blue plastic pieces are dust caps for the unused ports on the board.



All up we have:

Twelve SATA cables

Front panel or PCI combo USB 3.0 adapter

User Manual

Installation guide

Driver DVD

I/O panel

SLI bridge connector (for dual card)

Two bags of dust caps



Moving onto the board itself, The X79R-AX follows ECS's now traditional white and grey on black color scheme. Whilst looks are subject to opinion, we think the board looks great.

The layout is mostly fine with a few little niggles. All fan headers are located around the top of the board (right in the picture.) One or two placed at the bottom of the board would be nice for those users with cases containing bottom mounted fans. The voltage read points will probably be obscured by the ATX cable but really, that's a trivial matter for 99.9% of users.

The wire coming off the back of the wireless dongle is an antenna with a sticky back for attachment to an available surface.



The X79R-AX supports quad CrossfireX and SLI. The molex connector at the top left provides supplementary power for multi GPU systems.

The grey slots are PCIe 16x with the whites defaulting to PCIe 8x. There are a pair of PCIe 1x slots as well. All slots support PCIe 3.0. The layout is great, with at least one free slot available even with three dual slot graphics cards present.



Looking at the top half of the board, obviously there's only four RAM slots. ECS made the decision to keep the board at a standard ATX size which wouldn't have been possible with eight (Editor's note: The ASUS P8P67 series does have eight slots on an ATX form factor) and the extra controllers on board.



The rear I/O panel is crammed full with ports. We have a CMOS clear button, a PS/2 mouse/keyboard port, six USB 2.0 and four USB 3.0 ports, dual gigabit LAN ports, a pair of eSATA 6 GB/s ports as well as standard S/PDIF optical audio and analogue ports. The two dongles are for the onboard wireless LAN supporting B/G/N and Bluetooth supporting v2.1+ EDR.

The audio chip used is a Realtek ALC892. While still a 7.1 chip, it is a step below what some competing boards are using. It is a similar story with the LAN chips, which are Realtek RTL8111E. The two eSATA ports are controlled by a Asmedia ASM1061. The four USB 3.0 ports are controlled by a Texas Instruments TUSB7340.

[siopao1984]

A Closer Look Part II

A sassy ECS

Below we see the most interesting feature of the X79R-AX: the inclusion of four 6GB/s capable SAS ports. Astute readers will know that these ports were originally part of the X79 chipset specification prior to their last minute removal. According to Intel, they were removed due to out of spec I/O performance being seen under certain temperature and voltage conditions. They are still present on every X79 motherboard but manufacturers have opted to follow Intel and not activate them. ECS have bucked this trend. Since SAS technology is designed with heavy I/O in mind, uses higher signalling voltages and is an enterprise level technology with stringent validation requirements, the chances are that a regular SATA drive will never encounter any problem, although only time will tell.

From left to right we have a pair of SATA 6GB/s ports controlled by a Asmedia ASM1051 chip, four SAS/SATA 6GB/s ports wired to the X79 chipset, four standard X79 SATA 3GB/s ports(white) and finally the X79 SATA 6GB/s ports.



Unfortunately we didn't have a SAS drive on hand to test. To activate the ports, the Intel Rapid Storage Technology driver needs to be installed, hence an operating system cannot be installed from scratch on these ports. We would recommend using the regular X79 SATA ports for the OS and use the SAS ports as regular SATA ports for storage drives that won't encounter high and continuous I/O levels.



PWM

The PWM is controlled by an analogue Intersil ISL6366 which is a dual 6+1 phase controller resulting in twelve phases for the CPU and two for the system agent or I/O. While many manufacturers have transitioned to digital PWM systems, the ISL6366 is one of the best performing and most reliable analogue controllers on the market.



Like most boards these days, the drivers and MOSFETs are integrated which saves on board space. They are found on the front and back of the board. They are Fairchild Semiconductor FDMF6705V MOSFETS which have an efficiency rating above 93%, a current handling rating of 43A per unit and up to 1Mhz switching frequency.





The heatsink is solid and heavy. It makes good contact with the components. The pressure of the MOSFET heatsink is slightly weighted to one side due to the screw positions. There shouldn't be any cause for concern as all the chips are in complete contact.

This heatsink has a really nifty feature. It has what ECS calls thermo chromic strips on both sections that change color according to the temperature. On the chipset heatsink, a series of numbers progressively light up as the temperature rises. The tribal image on the PWM heatsink also changes color although it is likely to be hidden by almost all CPU heatsinks. With a fan blowing over the PWM area, only once did we see the color change and the chipset heatsink never hit 50c.

With a windowed case this should be a pretty cool feature, unless of course it is obscured beneath multiple graphics cards.



There are a set of voltage read points onboard for the hardcore overclockers. Unfortunately the ATX power cable gets on the way and hinders accessibility.

[siopao1984]

The BIOS & Software

The X79R-AX defaults to an advanced BIOS display mode. There is a simplified easy mode for novice users but not having the option enabled by default defeats the purpose of having it really. Reviewers love the ease of saving screenshots with most brands' UEFI BIOS'. The option to do so is lacking for the X79R-AX so we've reverted to the photo of the screen method.

Below is the main page which is seen when entering the BIOS. It would be nice to see some information such as installed hardware specifications, CPU temperature or the BIOS version here.



The advanced tab contains most of the controls for the onboard devices as well as the PC health status. The SCU SATA configuration is where the SAS ports can be enabled.



The chipset tab contains few options, however one of the options under the PCH tab is the option to enable or disable audio. It seems to be a strange place to put this control given the audio controller is not part of the PCH. Relocating this option to the advanced tab would be logical.



Below is the MIB.X page which contains the overclocking controls.

The voltage functions are controlled by an offset shown in millivolts. It is not an intuitive method and is one we'd prefer to see changed. It is simply easier to key in or select, for example, 1.45v instead of working out the offset from the default voltage. We have forwarded this suggestion (amongst others) to ECS and hope they change it.

Overall the general overclocking functionality of the page works OK but its design is not as intuitive as some vendors implementations.



The topmost CPU configuration page contains the standard options such as C-States, hyperthreading, core count and power options.



The CPU overclocking function menu contains the CPU multiplier control and advanced power controls.



The memory overclocking function page contains the XMP controls, memory multiplier and timings.

When changing the memory multiplier in manual mode, it may be necessary to manually adjust the timings. There is no auto timing setting so if the user is experiencing instability when running high frequency memory, these timings being too tight is probably the reason.



Need any more boot options?



There are eight nameable profile slots in the profile configuration page.

There are a lot of similar looking options here. Save changes and exit and save changes and reset do the same thing.. strange..



Software

ECS includes some useful utilities on the bundled DVD.

The ECS OC utility is fairly basic compared to some but it does work well. Voltage is controlled by actual value which would be great to see in the BIOS itself! CPU base clock is controlled in 1Mhz increments. The monitoring page only shows CPU and system temperatures.



A really good little utility coming with the board is a fully featured hysteresis fan control application. Many companies offer a straight slider control for fan speeds but with this method the fan can be ramped according to a user set curve. The user can therefore choose a setup that works best for them.

[siopao1984]

Test Setup

CPU
Intel i7 3960X Extreme Edition ES @ 4.0Ghz (40x100)

Motherboards
ECS X79R-AX w/BIOS MT7S
MSI X79A-GD65 w/ BIOS 1.0b27

Memory
4x4gb G.Skill Trident 2000 8-9-8-24 @ 2133Mhz 9-10-9-27 1T

Graphics Card
MSI N580GTX Lightning (832/1050Mhz)

HDD
Western Digital Velociraptor 150gb

Power Supply
Antec HCP-1200w

OS
Windows 7 64bit w/ SP1
Driver
Nvidia Forceware 285.62 WHQL
For comparison purposes, we used the MSI X79A-GD65 which is a similarly priced competitor.

Other than the video encoding test, all benchmarks were run three times with the median result being the one reported.



Benchmarks







For the video encode test we used a 33 minute 1080p video and converted it to an Mp4 at a resolution of 1024x576 suitable for playback on an Ipad.



In general the X79R-AX is very narrowly behind the MSI in 2D testing, but as with every motherboard tested, the differences are minute.

[siopao1984]

Benchmarks Part II

Moving on to some 3D testing:









While the MSI has a tiny lead in 2D testing, The ECS puts up a good showing in 3D testing, either matching or beating the MSI. Once again though the differences are minimal as you would expect of now mature X79 motherboards and BIOS'. Although not shown here, the flagship Asus Rampage IV Extreme still has an edge in 3D efficiency.



SAS 6Gb/s port vs SATA 6Gb/s port

Lastly, we ran a couple of tests to compare the X79R-AX's SAS 6Gb/s ports against its own X79 SATA 6Gb/s ports. Since we didn't have a SAS drive on hand to test with, we used a 120gb Kingston HyperX 120gb SSD to test their relative performance. To get the SAS 6GB/s ports working, they need to be enabled in the BIOS. Once in Windows the Intel Rapid Storage Technology Enterprise driver needs to be installed. After a reboot we had fully working SAS capable ports!

In addition the ATTO and Crystal Disk Mark tests, we wanted to run HD Tune Pro, but we were greeted with a BSOD immediately upon opening the program with the drive plugged into a SAS port. Not exactly what we were hoping to see..

ATTO Disk Benchmark

SATA 6Gb/s port





SAS port



The ATTO benchmark shows peak throughput. The regular SATA 6Gb/s port is consistently ahead of the SAS port in raw throughput. Additionally, the SAS port shows some inconsistency in read and write speeds relative to the SATA port.



Crystal Disk Mark 3.0.1 x64

SATA 6Gb/s port





SAS port



Again the SATA port is consistently in front of the SAS port.

While only two benchmarks won't paint the whole picture, the SAS ports do seem to be a little behind in performance. Given these ports were removed by Intel and are not officially supported, we'd have to recommend these ports for simple data storage or a drive that doesn't see constant accesses and high levels of I/O.

[siopao1984]

We switched over to a shiny new Kingston kit for some overclocking tests. Memory overclocking was acceptable but not at the levels we have achieved on other boards. We were pleased to see the 2400Mhz memory multiplier working well which is not the case with every board. In terms of CPU overclocking, we just couldn't get any sort of stability above about 4.8ghz which is well below the 5Ghz plus we have seen on this chip for short bursts on watercooling.

Basic functionality such as the CPU and memory multipliers and 125Mhz base clock strap worked well enough (particularly with the latest 2/6/2012 BIOS), but too many nagging issues remain with the BIOS to justify the X79R-AX as a pure overclocking board. Overclock recovery is next to nonexistent, meaning a power off and CMOS clear is required for any settings too aggressive to make it to POST. We'd also like to see actual voltage selection rather than an offset value. We have sent some feedback to ECS with some things we'd like to see improved upon. If not with this board, then with future ones.

The X79R-AX may have disappointed with our manual overclocking attempts, however the same cannot be said of the auto overclocking function. We selected the 'Quick OC' function in the MIBX page of the BIOS and after a reboot the system was stable at 4.5Ghz with the memory running at its rated speed of 2400Mhz! This setting would make a good sweet spot 24/7 overclock with zero tweaking required. The C-States remained active with the system idling at 1200Mhz at 1.0v. Very impressive indeed! Assuming that end users components are suitably compatible in the same ways ours were, we'd have to say the X79R-AX has one of the best auto overclocking functions of any motherboard we've ever tested. Boot, select quick OC and reboot. Thumbs up!

We ran HyperPi with all twelve threads and memory fully loaded and passed with flying colors.

Auto OC setting @1.416v load





Auto OC setting @ 1.008v idle




At the end of the day this sort of overclock is good enough for most of the market but we were left wanting more on the manual side of things. We hope ECS can invest some resources into their BIOS development. If they can, then there's nothing stopping them from carving out a slice of the OC market for themselves with budget priced, yet premium featured overclockable rockets.

[siopao1984]

Conclusion

The ECS X79R-AX strongly appeals with its premium feature set at a budget price. We love the value added with the inclusion of WiFi, Bluetooth and the unique array of SATA ports. A power user wanting to build a powerful media and encoding system using stacks of hard drives with a range of networking options will find a lot to like. Gamers will appreciate the quad GPU capability and the impressive auto overclocking setting.

As we showed in the overclocking section, we must emphasise how impressed we were with the automatic overclocking setting. Selecting one single BIOS setting resulting in a stable 4.5ghz overclock and 2400Mhz memory with zero tweaking is very impressive. It's one of the best and most aggressive automatic overclocking implementations we've seen.

The hardcore overclockers would be advised to consider one of the established premium overclocking boards. We were pleased that functionality and memory compatibilty was good but our experiences with the BIOS when pushing hard were not positive. Overclocking isn't everything though and most that do it are the 24/7 folks who view a stable overclock as the objective. These users will be pleased to find the X79R-AX will happily run in this range. If ECS can devote some serious resources to their BIOS development then there's nothing stopping them from competing in the overclocking motherboard marketplace.

ECS have made a bold decision to include the four SAS ports at the behest of Intel. As SAS technology must adhere to a more stringent level of qualification testing, we hope that regular SATA drives will never encounter any issues. They should be viewed as extra storage ports for media collections or.. err.. a ton on Linux ISO's.

Bang for buck with stacks of features is what we like. The ECS X79R-AX carries a US suggested retail price of $309.99 before rebates, putting it up against the likes of the MSI X79-GD65 and Asrock X79 Extreme6. For the price, features wise, the ECS is a good strong contender.



Pros
Tons of SATA ports
Choice of connectivity options
Excellent price
Very impressive stable auto overclock at 4.5GHz & 2400Mhz memory!

Cons
Audio and LAN controllers a step below the competitors
BIOS could really use some polish for enthusiast OC'ers
Nonexistent failed OC recovery
No fan headers on the bottom half of the board