P55 ECS P55H-A Black Series

ECS have opted to use a dragon design for their P55H-A Black Series box and add a few logos on the front to advertise some of the board features. Inside the box is a basic bundle which contains drive cables, documentation, driver CD and I/O shield.

The board itself looks quite like the A785GM board we recently reviewed, mainly because of the same brown PCB and a similar colour scheme. ECS supply three system fan headers on this board and although the standard 8/24 PIN PSU connectors are present they also add a four pin Molex socket for added stability. It would be nice to see ECS move to a SATA style power connector for this component as Intel has done.

Slot layout on the P55H-A is similar to older boards and runs PCIe 16x, PCIe 1x, PCIe 4x, PCIe 8x, PCI, PCI but thanks to the layout of the board there are no problems with clearance as the 16x slot sits well below the memory slots.

There are plenty of connectivity options along the bottom edge of the board with the main items being three USB headers and six SATA ports. Sitting above these are onboard power and reset buttons and to the left of these is a debug LED display. As expected the P55H-A has four memory slots split over two channels and although writing on the PCB states DDR3-1333 the option for 1600MHz is present in the BIOS, providing an 800 series CPU is installed.

External connectivity is good with two PS/2 ports, eight USB 2.0, GB-LAN, eSATA and analogue/optical audio. An external clear CMOS button can also be found between the PS/2 and USB ports.

ECS Bios

ECS use an American Megatrends BIOS for this board and all of the performance features can be found in the M.I.B screen. In here we can configure various options including CPU voltage which can be increased by +630mV. As we have mentioned in the past we would prefer to see ECS use real decimal voltages and hope they will in the future. The P55H-A also supports eJiffy, a feature which is similar to the Asus ExpressGate and offers quick access to a basic OS within seconds of powering on.

Download full bios screens here.