ECS Black Series H57H-MUS

The Black Series H57H-MUS is the only motherboard that ECS offers with an Intel H57 Northbridge.

The board features a micro-ATX form factor and as a result is quite cramped - the memory slots sit very close to the lone PCI-E x16 graphics slot, so if a full-size GPU is present, unlocking the locks on the slots will be quite problematic.

This motherboard offers USB3.0 and Serial ATA 6Gbps support but strangely, rather than being integrated on the board itself, ECS provides these features on two separate PCI-E expansion cards. If you want both features then, the PCI-E x1 and PCI-E x4 slots will have to be used, meaning you won't be able to add any new PCI-E cards. A single PCI slot is present however, so you can still opt to use a PCI-based expansion device.

Peering into the ECS' BIOS we found it similar to the last Black Series board we reviewed, meaning it offers some tweaking options but not enough for serious overclocking. Not ideal if you have a multiplier locked processor.

To test this motherboard we built a system around it using an Intel Core i7 860 processor, 4GB of Kingston Hyper X DD3 memory and a Gigabyte GeForce GTX 480 graphics card. We also used a 1TB WD Caviar Black hard drive and Windows 7. Running our standard testing suite on the board, it posted figures that were higher than ECS' own H55H-CM.