ECS Elitegroup Z77H2-AX Golden Board (Z77) Motherboard Review

Taking a look at the board as a whole, we see a simple ATX form factor board that Flava Flav has clearly got his hands on. The board used a black PCB with black and gold accented components. So lets take a closer look at the board, in some more detail.

The first pot of gold is situated around the CPU socket, with some quite extreme passive cooling to help keep the VRMs nice and chilled. Also around the CPU socket, we find plenty of gold capacitors to give the best possible performance. The passive heatsinks include a heatpipe design to join them, and they have a very unique look to say the least. Even the CPU socket itself is gold. Bling, Bling. Just behind the bling, you’ll see a 8-pin power connector to provide sufficient power to the CPU and its surrounding areas.

The cooling follows down the board, and includes another passive heatsink which is connected via a heatpipe. This one is a low-profile design and includes the Black Extreme branding upon it. The key feature of this heatsink is that it changes colour once it heats up. Now that is cool (no pun intended!).

Being a Z77 based board, we find four DIMM slots, in dual-channel mode supporting up to 32GB of DDR3. The board supports DDR3 up to 2800MHz, though parts of the box state 2600MHz and official white papers say 2400MHz and 2800MHz. All we are currently going by, is the official specifications listed on the ECS website as this is most likely to be the most current and updated information around. Also near to the memory you will find a fan header, 24-pin ATX power connector, and close by is also a power and reset button.

Moving over to an area that will leave gamers drooling, we find the expansion slots. ECS certainly haven’t skimped on the expansion slots and we find (from the top) two PCI-Express x1 slots, three PCI-Express x16 slots, with 2X16 1X8, 2X16 support by the PLX8747 chip which sits just above the expansion slots. You will also find  two legacy PCI slots. The board also supports 3-way CrossFireX and 3-way SLI technologies for some extreme gaming.

Taking a look further down, at the various headers and connectors, we can see front panel audio headers and SPDIF_OUT, a COM port header, system fan, SPI_Debug, a single USB 2.0 header, a single USB 3.0 header and the typical front panel connectors.

Taking a closer look at the various storage capabilities that this board has. Firstly you will notice that an mSATA port is present on the board, just near to the SATA ports. Between them is also a debug LED to assist when overclocking or troubleshooting.

Moving on to the full-sized SATA ports, we find a total of six with four being taken care of by the Intel Z77 chipset, with the the two furthest to the left supporting SATA 3Gb/s speeds, and the middle two supporting SATA 6Gb/s speeds. These four connectors also support RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10 configurations.

The other two SATA ports on the right are supported by the ASMEDIA ASM1061 and support SATA 6Gb/s devices but include no RAID support.

Lastly, moving around to the rear I/O where the bling returns with some gold colouring. From the left, we find a Bluetooth module, two USB 2.0 ports, and an eSATA 6Gb/s port. Just to the right of this is a Clear CMOS button, VGA connector and HDMI. Next to this is a WiFi dongle which has an attachment behind it to fixate an Antenna. Below this is a further two USB 2.0 ports and another eSATA 6Gb/s port provided by the ASMEDIA ASM1061 chip.

Four USB 3.0 ports are on the rear, as well as Realtek RTL8111E Gigabit Ethernet LAN and SPDIF, along with five 3.5mm jack connectors supporting Realtek ALC892 8-channel High Definition audio.