Introduction

When it comes to motherboards, ECS probably isn't one of the first names that pop into your head. Instead it will be companies like ASUS, ASRock, GIGABYTE and MSI. Earlier in the year, though, we checked out the A75 based ECS A75F-A and it did a good job of impressing us and being a pretty nice all round board.

Today, though, we take the time to check out something a lot higher end in the form of the Intel X79 based X79R-AX. We saw ECS do a pretty good job with the lower end A75 board; it will be interesting to see how they handle the new high end chipset from Intel along with our high end i7 3960X CPU.

As always, we'll start by checking out the package to see what ECS are offering us before we move inside to see the bundle that's available. Once we've done that we'll move onto the board itself before we head into the BIOS, check out our testbed, talk about overclocking potential a bit and finally get into the performance side of things to see just what the ECS X79R-AX can do for us today with our i7 3960X CPU.

That just about covers everything, so let's just get stuck into the package to see what's going on here today.

The Package

ECS has put together a really big box with a wealth of information including the ability to get a bit of a sneak peak at the actual motherboard. Throughout the whole box, though, we've got a long list of what's going on with the board and I've got to say I love the bright color scheme going on, as it really helps it stand out.

Moving inside the box, you can see the normal array of paperwork that sits alongside a driver CD, I/O back plate and single extended SLI bridge at the bottom.

In the SATA cable department we've just got a mammoth amount of them included. As you can see above, the total SATA cable count comes in as a massive 12. More than we see on most boards - hopefully we've got enough SATA ports included on the board.

Along with all that, we've also got a USB 3.0 header in the bundle that can go on the front of your PC or via the bracket we can install it at the rear. Along with that we've also got all these little protectors that can go in the USB ports to protect them from any damage. You don't have to use them, but they're here if you do.