ECS P55H-AK Black Series

The P55H-AK Black Series is the range topper in ECS' LGA1156 series. In line with its high-end positioning, the Intel P55-based P55H-AK is chock full of features.
   
For starters it features three PCI-E x16 slots and supports three-way multi-GPU setups from both AMD and nVidia. Because the P55 chipset on its own would limit the amount of bandwidth available for high-end multi-GPU setups, ECS has fitted the board with nVidia's NF200 chip which offers 32 PCI-E lanes for the PCI-E x16 slots. The board also features two 6Gbps Serial ATA ports in addition to six 3Gbps ports and, as you'd expect of an ATX P55 board, there are four DDR3 DIMM sockets.

The ECS is cleanly laid out, there's ample space between the first PCI-E x16 slot and four DDR3 DIMM sockets, so installing and removing memory is easy. The Serial ATA ports are placed at 90-degress angles, so you can easily attach cables without worrying about going around lengthy PCI-E cards.

Running our benchmarks we found its performance sublime. In our Cinebench R10 multi-core CPU test, the ECS returned a result of 10,700, making it faster than MSI's P55-GD65 motherboard. The P55H-AK'S DivX and Lame encode times of 23-seconds and two minutes and 33 seconds also eclipse the MSI by reasonable margins.