[section_title title=”Closer Look”]
Closer Look
Upon first inspection, the Z87H3-A3X is thinner than your typical ATX form factor motherboard, and by that I mean it isn’t as wide. It’s not uncommon for budget motherboards to have less PCB real estate as it helps to keep the costs down and as there are less components on the board anyway, due to them being excluded for monetary reasons, there’s absolutely no point in wasting PCB as it would only make it more expensive in the long run. What you get in return is a lack of right angled SATA ports and some other fancy options like the overclocking buttons or LED display to show POST codes but they aren’t strictly necessary, even if they are nice to have. Where the motherboard does excel is its amount of fan headers. It’s nothing overly special, but usually on cheaper motherboards there is a distinctive lack of fan headers. Well, I say usually, but it really depends on the motherboard or even the series from which it came as some are worse than others. If we go in a clockwise fashion and start in the top left corner, we have a PWR fan header, which is a 3 pin and then two CPU fan headers which are both PWM. The next one is just south of the 24pin ATX power connector and it’s a 3 pin again. To finish off, there’s one slightly south west of the SATA ports and one between the PCIe lanes and the VRM heatsink, both of which are PWM headers. That makes for a total of six headers, including the CPU ones.
If you’re wondering why the sample pictures on the ECS website have their “dust filters,” it’s because the models that were produced after the media samples (ours) have them but ours unfortunately don’t. You will receive the dust filters with this motherboard, although I’m not entirely sure on their effectiveness as I’ve never seen any mass build up of dust forming behind a fan, other than using the Intel stock cooler of course.
The golden caps and the golden heatsinks are something which appears to be becoming a fashion statement. ASUS recently went with an all gold colour scheme, apart from their infamous ROG series, which has received mixed reviews around the globe. I’ve always liked the ROG theme and my test bed actually uses a ROG board as you probably know, but the gold theme may be here for a while so it may be best to embrace it, or simply get a motherboard without all of the golden bling bling. I don’t mind it so much on the capacitors but when big chunks of metal such as the heatsinks are gold, it comes off as looking cheap to me. However, aesthetics are only one small issue on a motherboard. When it comes down to it, it’s the performance that matters most to me as I am an overclocker and performance wins over looks, but from a reviewing standpoint, the looks are a little more important to me. Whether you choose to like or dislike the golden age we are apparently entering into, that’s entirely up to you.
Another thing that surprises me with this motherboard, just like the quantity of fan headers, is the power circuitry for the CPU. On budget motherboards, you’re lucky to get four phases. There’s usually only three chokes and overclocking is extremely limited. However, on the ECS, there are no less than six power phases. Considering that this is indeed a budget motherboard, it is likely to be in a 4+1+1 configuration, but that still leaves us with four for the CPU alone which should be ample for mediocre to average overclocks without glowing red hot when they’re pushed.
There are four DIMM slots which support up to 32GB of DDR3-3000MHz (overclocked) memory. That is of course relying on your IMC (Integrated Memory Controller) on your CPU in order to obtain such ludicrous speeds. One thing which I can’t quite wrap my head around is the slot spacing. The two closest to the CPU are right next to each other and the remaining two are spaced further apart. The reason for this is because of the transistors that lay between DIMM 3 and 4. It does bug my inner OCD monkey and I do like things to be symmetrical but the smaller PCB means that things have to be placed slightly differently in order to be able to fit on.
Budget motherboards usually come with non-right angled SATA connectors and the Z87H3-A3X is no exception. While they are in a place where even if you were using dual graphics cards, with dual slot coolers, they wouldn’t be disturbed and you should still be able to use all six. Unfortunately, it does make for some difficult cable management but it’s unlikely that you’d use all six ports on a budget. They are there because the Z87 chipset gives you that many without an added controller from the likes of ASMedia, so you may as well include them. The ports do support RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10. The reason one of the ports is grey is so that you know which will become disabled when you plug a device into the eSATA port at the back. In the very top right hand corner of the picture is a USB 3.0 header for your front USB 3.0 ports, should you require or want them.
Next up, the PCIe lanes. There are six PCIe lanes on the board. Four of which are PCIe x1 2.0 and the x16 slots are 3.0 lanes. While I cannot imagine the slots being fully populated, it’s nice to see that there is some choice for you to add in additional sound cards, LAN cards and anything else PCIe based should you wish to do so. On a separate note, as the crypto currency mining craze is booming at the moment, it would make an ideal motherboard to run six graphics cards from with the right equipment. As always, that’s a topic for another day, though. Moving on!
The inputs and outputs of the ECS GANK DRONE Z87H3-A3X certainly do not disappoint and I must say that there is a lot more on the back panel than I thought there would be. Normally, on budget boards, you’d find very little in the way of USB 2.0/3.0 ports and the graphics outputs are somewhat lacking. On the Z87H3-A3X however, there is no shortage of either. Going from left to right, we have a PS2 port for either a keyboard or a mouse and two USB 2.0 ports beneath it. We then have the array of graphics outputs in the form of a VGA port, a DVI port and a HDMI port with an eSATA 6Gbps port above it. When the eSATA port is in use, the grey SATA port, port number 6, becomes unavailable as they share the same port. Next up is the stack of four USB 3.0 ports that are soon followed by the Intel I217-V gigabit LAN port and two more USB 2.0 ports. Right at the end, we have the various audio outputs including S/PDIF which are all controlled by the Realtek ALC1150 sound chip.
As this is a rather compact board, it made it somewhat difficult to fit a Thermalright Silver Arrow SB-E Extreme cooler to it. The fins from the cooler touch the VRM heatsink due to it being so tall, although it’s not needed as other manufacturers get away with something half its size such as that on my ASUS Maximus VI Hero. I know it is a design feature but it does limit your cooler choice somewhat. Luckily the SB-E is thin but you have no hope of installing a second fan to it, only one in the middle as the outer fan will collide with either the VRM heatsink or the RAM on the other side.
