ECS is jumping into the Z97 field with the release of the Z97-Machine motherboard, which takes part of its L33T Gaming series of products, as we have seen beginning with last year. It is shipped inside a quite large cardboard box, with the usual logos of the supported technologies on top:

ECS reminds us that this is the first board to adopt ESS SABRE Premier amplifier, which is the highest quality audio DAC for high-fidelity gaming headsets. As we can also see on the back side of the packaging, the LAN interface is provided by Intel controller, 4K video output is available and the Dual Advanced MOSFETs are providing up to 90% power efficiency:

After removing the top packaging layer, we will end up with a black box, featuring the product logo in the middle:

On the top box layer, we will find the motherboard, which is also fully wrapped inside an anti-static bag:

The bottom layer includes the rest of the bundle along with the documentation:

Besides four SATA cables, we will also receive one User Guide, a general assembly guide along with the I/O shield:

An installation disk is located inside the User Manual, which also contains besides the drivers some bundled applications:

The GANK series is composed from the Domination segment, Machine and Drone; Domination is practically ECS high-end for the Intel platform but, as BIOSTAR, they have decided not to launch first a Domination motherboard so they have settled for Machine, which is practically mainstream. The board is not overcrowded and contains the essentials; a M.2(NGFF) slot is located on the bottom, but we really wonder why ECS has minimized the number of available SATA ports from six to four: