ECS Elitegroup P55H-A

BIOS:

ECS Elitegroup uses American Megatrends Inc for the BIOS on their motherboards with the one found on the P55H-A not being very different from other ECS motherboards we have reviewed in the past. The PC health monitoring attributes from the BIOS include the system temperature, CPU fan speed, system fan speed, CPU Vcore, and VDIMM. There is also a smart fan feature that can be controlled. The CPU voltage can be increased by up to +0.63V along with the DDR3 memory going up to +0.63V increase while the Intel PCH can be upped +0.3V. There are also options within the BIOS for adjusting Intel Turbo Mode, DRAM frequency, DRAM command rate, and PCI-E overclocking. The AMI BIOS and its options are not nearly as elaborate as what can be found in the latest ASUS or Gigabyte products, but it is modest especially for being a low-cost motherboard. BIOSes from ECS have also gotten a lot better over the years, as have their overclocking abilities.

System Setup:

Once overcoming some BIOS issues causing a performance problem with the Intel Kingsberg motherboard, the DP55DKG motherboard had worked out well on Linux back in September except for having no sensor support. The story is much the same with the P55H-A, but without any BIOS issue. The ECS P55H-A had no problems running with Ubuntu 9.10 (x86_64) and the Linux 2.6.31 kernel. The LiveCD desktop had booted up fine and the installation went well. All of the onboard hardware had worked with the exception of LM_Sensors in Ubuntu 9.10 / Linux 2.6.31 kernel failing to detect any hardware monitoring sensors. This is a disappointment to us, but most users will be fine without this support for now as it should not be a showstopper.

Our test system consisted of an Intel Core i7 870 processor running at 2.93GHz with Turbo Mode enabled, 2GB of OCZ DDR3 system memory, a 320GB Seagate ST3320620AS SATA hard drive, and an ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB graphics card. During testing we were using Ubuntu 9.10 x86_64 with the Linux 2.6.31 kernel, X Server 1.6.4, Catalyst 9.10, GCC 4.4.1, and the default EXT4 file-system.

We had a brief stint with overclocking the Core i7 870 when it was installed in the P55H-A. We encountered no problems hitting 3.6GHz with the Core i7 870 after just a few minutes of tweaking the BIOS options. We are sure a higher clock speed could have been hit, but it was stable at this speed, but our key focus though is on the Linux compatibility and performance with these reviews.

The tests carried out by the Phoronix Test Suite included Nexuiz, World of Padman, Unigine Tropics, PostMark, IOzone, C-Ray, and Stream. We compared the performance of the ECS P55H-A to that of the Intel DP55KG.