Intel’s Cougar Point chipset had a rough launch this year. It was introduced at CES at the same time as the Sandy Bridge family of CPUs, released to market, and then recalled due to a faulty SATA controller—all within the span of two months. Then came the months-long wait for motherboards with the revised “B3” chipset. Today, almost all manufacturers have completed the repair work on their entire line of motherboards, and all is right with the world.

ECS has provided three of their motherboards for review: the P67H2-A2 Black Deluxe (ATX), H67H2-M Black (uATX), and H67H2-I (mini-ITX). All three boards support any LGA 1155 Core i3/i5/i7 (Sandy Bridge) CPU, and are now available at retail with the revised B3 chipset.

Specs

P67H2-A2 Black Deluxe H67H2-M Black H67H2-I Form Factor ATX Micro ATX Mini ITX Chipset Intel P67 Intel H67 Intel H67 Price (MSRP) $179.99 $139.99 $89.99 RAM Speeds up to DDR3-2133 DDR3-1333 DDR3-1333 Max RAM 32GB (4x8GB) 32GB (4x8GB) 16GB (2x8GB) PCI Express 2.0 x16 2 (x16/x0 or x8/x8) 1 1 PCI Express x1 1 2 0 PCI 2 1 0 SATA 6Gb/s 4 2 2 SATA 3Gb/s 4 3 2 On-CPU GPU Support No Yes Yes eSATA 2x eSATA 6Gb/s 1x eSATA 3Gb/s 1x eSATA 3Gb/s USB 3.0 2 2 2 USB 2.0 8 4 6 Video Ports N/A VGA

DVI

HDMI 1.4A

DisplayPort VGA

DVI

HDMI 1.4A SLI Support Yes No No CrossFireX Support Yes No No Network 2x 10/100/1000 Mbps 2x 10/100/1000 Mbps 1x 10/100/1000 Mbps Warranty 3 years 3 years 3 years

Of the three review boards only the P67H2-A2 Black Deluxe is capable of multi-GPU support—it can do both AMD Crossfire and NVIDIA SLI. In either case, a dual-GPU configuration will be limited to dual PCIe x8 speeds. Also available to the P67 chipset (but not the H67) is the ability to overclock more than ‘four bins’ beyond the CPU’s default setting when it is paired with a multiplier-unlocked K-series CPU.

At the same time, the two H67-based boards are the only ones capable of utilizing Intel’s IGP. HTPC users will certainly appreciate Intel’s IGP in this setup as it is a very capable media playback device—not so good for heavy gaming, but fine for general use. Overclockers will also want to skip motherboards with the H67 chipsetºCPU overclocking is limited to a multiplier of four over the CPU’s default setting, which basically means no higher than supported Turbo Boost speeds.

All three boards feature the standard ECS blue/gray color scheme, while the two larger boards also include heatpipes and designs similar to other motherboards in their higher-end Black Deluxe series. The layout of each board is as clean and organized as possible, and all are very easy to work with.

Inside the boxes are the standard I/O shield, SATA cables, instructions, and driver disc. The P67H2-A2 also includes a USB 3.0 bracket and SLI bridge.

The test configurations are as follows:

Intel AMD CPU Core i7 2600K Phenom II X6 1100T Motherboard ECS P67H2-A2 Black Deluxe

ECS H67H2-M Black

ECS H67H2-I Gigabyte GA-890FXA-UD5 RAM 4GB DDR3-1600 (9-9-9) (P67)

4GB DDR3-1333 (9-9-9) (H67) 4GB DDR3-1600 (9-9-9) GPU Radeon HD 6950 2GB Radeon HD 6950 2GB Heatsink/Thermal Material Noctua NH-D14/OCZ Freeze (P67)

Stock Intel Cooler/OCZ Freeze (H67) Noctua NH-D14/OCZ Freeze Storage OCZ Vertex 2 120GB OCZ Vertex 2 120GB

Curiously, the P67H2-A2 Black Deluxe at first only allowed above DDR3-1333 speeds only when the RAM contained an XMP profile. The most current BIOS revision fixed that problem though.

All systems were tested using AMD’s Catalyst 11.5 drivers with hotfix #2 applied.

Benchmarking

The ECS H67H2-M Black and H67H2-I performance numbers were so close in every test that they will be grouped as a single entity.

Synthetic Benchmarks

PCMark Vantage

PCMark 7

All three of the ECS boards do an excellent job of showing off the power of Intel’s second generation i7 CPUs under Futuremark’s whole-system benchmark suites.

SiSoft Sandra 2011 SP1

It’s no secret—Intel’s Sandy Bridge CPUs are extremely fast. While SiSoft Sandra is a synthetic benchmark, it really does demonstrate a massive speed advantage over the Phenom II X6 1100T in our AMD system.

The memory controller on Sandy Bridge is excellent, offering more throughput at DDR3-1333 on the slower H67 motherboards than DDR3-1600 speeds on our 890FX platform. Of course moving to DDR3-1600 speeds on the P67 motherboard offers an additional 17% boost over the H67 motherboards. Both Intel chipsets offer lower memory latency than the AMD system to boot.

Real Applications

MP3 Encoding

The Core i7 CPU holds about a 25% performance advantage here. While a few seconds saved on a single disc may not sound like that big of a deal, it can really make a difference if you are converting a large CD collection.

H.264 Encoding

Again, the performance gap isn’t large for H.264 encoding (12-14%), but if you have a large number of files to convert, a Core i7 is not a bad choice.

Games

The normal selection of benchmarking games has been pared down a bit to avoid a lot of repetition, but what is show is a very accurate representation of the overall experience with all three ECS LGA1155 motherboards.

Metro 2033

Aliens vs Predator (FPS)

Lost Planet 2 (FPS)

Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. II

Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II

Batman: Arkham Asylum

Crysis: Warhead (FPS)

Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X.

Gaming Summary

At lower settings, most of the games favor the Intel platforms. Once settings are raised to the maximum, there really isn’t much of a performance difference to speak of, which means the GPU is now the bottleneck.

Generally speaking, the CPU isn’t as important as the GPU where gaming performance is concerned. For the few games where the CPU does make a notable dfference (the H.A.W.X. series and Batman), the numbers are already so high that no real difference would be visible during actual gaming. Still, the Intel systems do outperform the AMD system, so there are bragging rights to be had there.

Storage

PCMark Vantage Disk Suite

CrystalDiskMark

AS-SSD

Atto

Storage summary

The storage subsystem is exactly what is expected. The OCZ Vertex 2 one of the fastest drives out there, and it does really well on all three ECS motherboards. I didn’t have a SATA III device available to test the faster ports, but that will be fixed soon. The SATA II controller on the ECS motherboards is just as good, if not better than the controller on our AMD benchmark system.

Power/Heat

Power usage is monitored by observing a Kill-A-Watt. CPU/GPU heat is measured by CoreTemp. Both power and heat will be measured at idle and under load during instances of Handbrake and Metro 2033 at max settings.

Our Intel systems use slightly less power than the AMD system. Improved power management combined with the 32nm process Sandy Bridge is built on certainly help.

The Core i7 is much hotter than the Phenom II using identical Noctua heatsinks. Interestingly, the Intel stock heatsink (used on the H67 board) maintains the same temperatures at idle as the Noctua heatsink. Of course when a load of any kind is applied, CPU temperatures get much higher using the stock heatsink.

Pricing, availability, and recommendations

The H67H2-M Black can be found as low as $95 on Google Shopping. We also found it for about $125 on SuperBiiz. It’s a pretty good deal if you require a microATX board. At that price, you’re looking at a board that sits right at the average price for similar motherboards. The only thing holding back a better recommendation is the lack of availability at well-known stores. That’s the worst to be said about it though. This board went with me to Expo Icrontic this year and served its purpose very well. If you can get your hands on it you’ll have a great board for a (large) traveling computer or powerful HTPC. It is awarded the Icrontic Stamp of Approval.

The H67H2-I can be found as low as $104 on Ebay, but just like the H67H2-M, this board cannot be found in the usual places. Also just like the H67H2-M, if you need a small but powerful PC for gaming or HTPC purposes this is an excellent motherboard. It just needs to be made available in more places. The ECS H67H2-I is awarded the Icrontic Stamp of Approval.

The P67H2-A2 Black Deluxe currently sells on Newegg for $149.99, with an additional $50 mail-in rebate. That’s a fantastic price for an SLI/Crossfire board. In fact, when the rebate is taken into consideration, the ECS P67H2-A2 becomes the least expensive multi-GPU motherboard based on the Intel P67 chipset on Newegg (a multi-GPU motherboard must support at least PCIe 8x speeds on two slots). The P67H2-A2 Black Deluxe is an excellent board at a killer price, and is named an Icrontic Outstanding Product.