ECS Z87H3-A2X Extreme

Written by Michael Larabel in Motherboards on 15 August 2013 at 01:10 PM EDT. Page 3 of 6. 9 Comments.

UEFI BIOS:

The UEFI BIOS on the ECS Z87H3-A2X Extreme is straightforward and has both basic and advanced viewing panes. CPU overclocking and adjustments come within ECS' MIB X area. All of the normal and enthusiast-related features one would expect from the UEFI/BIOS area are present and tunable. One minor complaint is that updating the UEFI/BIOS is limited on this ECS motherboard to using either a MS-DOS disk/USB drive or using the ECS Windows application. There's no easy way to update the Z87H3-A2X Extreme from within Linux. When trying to make a FreeDOS USB disk using Unetbootin, it failed to boot on the motherboard. For upgrading the BIOS I had to create an MS-DOS USB disk on a Windows 7 installation and then boot from that. It would be nice if ECS adopted an easier method of being able to flash a ROM image from its UEFI GUI similar to the recent approach taken by other motherboard vendors.


Overclocking:

Overclocking of the ECS Z87H3-A2X Extreme with an Intel Core i7 4770K CPU went fairly well with basic air-cooling. I was able to get the system to boot when the Haswell CPU was running at 4.6GHz through adjusting its core ratio and feeding it extra voltage, but it wasn't completely stable. In the more demanding CPU benchmarks the system would lock-up. At 4.5GHz, the system was stable for ~95% of the tests but would occasionally hit a wall. Intel Haswell overclocking continues to be a mixed story. Included with the Linux benchmarks in this article are some basic overclocking results when the i7-4770K was running at 4.2GHz, just for an additional reference point.

Linux Compatibility:

Key functionality of the ECS Z87H3-A2X Extreme is there if using Ubuntu 13.04 or Ubuntu 13.10 (i.e. the system boots and works) but the notable exception of no audio support other than Haswell HDMI audio. The HDA Intel driver is loaded on the Linux 3.10 and 3.11 kernels, but there was no analog audio working.

As other Phoronix benchmarks have shown, if relying upon Intel Haswell graphics you will also want to be using the very latest Linux kernel and Mesa code for the best performance. This is simply due to the state of the Intel Haswell Linux graphics driver support and not anything that's motherboard specific.

A smaller complaint about this motherboard on Linux is that with Linux 3.10/3.11 there also isn't any support for the motherboard's hardware sensors (thermal, voltages, fan speeds, etc) outside of the CPU temperature on the CPU package itself provided by the coretemp driver.

Aside from those issues and notably the audio problem, everything was working fine for the ECS Z87H3-A2X Extreme on Ubuntu with an up-to-date Linux kernel. The WiFi and Bluetooth for this Z87 motherboard was also working fine.

System Setup:

For this motherboard review the ECS Z87H3-A2X Extreme was benchmarked and compared to an Intel DH87RL motherboard. The ECS motherboard was run at its stock settings with the default/optimized UEFI parameters with an updated UEFI, just as with the Intel H87 motherboard. Additionally, there are ECS results when the i7-4770K was overclocked to 4.2GHz as an additional data point. Both motherboards were tested with an Intel Core i7 4770K CPU with HD Graphics 4600, 16GB of DDR3-1600MHz RAM, and a 240GB OCZ Vertex 3 SSD.

The benchmarking happened from an Ubuntu 13.10 x86_64 installation with the Linux 3.10 kernel, Xfce 4.10 desktop, and GCC 4.8.1 compiler. All benchmarking was facilitated using the Phoronix Test Suite open-source software.


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