ECS is a motherboard manufacturer, but it's not famous at all on the european market. Its brand is often linked to low-budget motherboards that can be found of those PC systems you can buy in big retail stores. It has been a couple of years, since ECS started producing interesting high-end products, such as the L337 Gaming series of motherboard, that should be quite nice.

The new Intel 9 series chipset was just announced yesterday, and we're sure we won't have to wait for long to see some new CPUs, but for now the manufacturer can only stuck their portfolios with new Z97 and H97 models.

The new ECS Z97-MACHINE is part of the L337 Gaming series, and it features a few interesting peculiarity that makes this board a gaming board: we have a 6-phase power design with high quality components and more resistant capacitors. This motherboard can fit up to 32GB of DDR3-3000 non-ECC, and it features the new M.2 port: other than that, there are 2 PCIe x16 Gen 3.0 and three PCIe x1 Gen 2.0. As long as storage is concerned, we find 4 SATA III ports and a M.2 port on the bottom of the board, so that there shouldn't be any issue while assemblying and routing the cables.

Talking about I/O connectivity, there is a PS2 port for keyboard or mouse, four USB 3.0, four USB 2.0, an RJ-45, an HDMI, DVI-D, VGA and S/PDIF, and of course audio connections. ECS stated that this motherboard will have a great price/performance ratio, but it didn't said anything about the actual price.




Source: Le Comptoir du Hardware.