A Closer Look

The front USB 3.0 panel is a very nice feature included by ECS; we can install inside any case that has 3.5’’ bays. if you have a rare ATX case without 3.5" slot, no worries, you can unscrew the connectors from the bracket and put them in the back of your case in a spare PCI slot:



Here is a closer look at the USB 3.0 panel; we can see that its front is made from black brushed aluminum, and fits best in cases made in the same color:



On each side, we can see two fixing holes:



The overall aspect of the board is hugely improved over the last board generations; we can clearly see that ECS did their best designing this motherboard, with lots of features, like 4 USB 3.0 ports instead of 2 as we can see on many other motherboards, 2 Ethernet controllers or the NVIDIA NF2100 chip:



Near the I/O shield ports, we can see one NEC D720200F1 USB 3.0 controller:



One of the Gigabit Ethernet Controllers, the Realtek RTL8111E, can be found on the left side of the PCB:



Near it, we can find the second identical Gigabit Ethernet Controllers, both which support LAN Teaming:



The audio interface on this board is provided by a Realtek ALC889 CODEC:



On the bottom part of the PCB, some more headers can be found: F_AUDIO, SPDIF, FHW, a case fan header and one for the USB 3.0 front panel:



Here is a closer look on the USB 3.0 header; we can observe that it has much more pins compared with a “normal” USB 2.0 header:



Surprisingly, near it we can find the second NEC USB 3.0 controller, the same model as the one we have seen near the I/O shield ports:



Further to the right, we can see a LED display which displays the POST errors, if any, the CMOS battery, the Power and Reset buttons, a little buzzer, and on the bottom we can see a Clear CMOS jumper, two USB 2.0 headers and a Front Panel header:



On the right side of the motherboard, we can see 6 SATA II ports and near them there are 2 SATA III ones: