ECS shows off first socket FM2+ motherboard and more

ECS was at Computex 2013 in Taipei and announced a couple of mid-range products for Intel’s Haswell processor family and AMD’s Kabini processor family.

As a brand that plays more to the value-over-performance market, ECS hasn’t made super high-end products in the past. This year they’re looking to make a statement and they started it off with the world’s first socket FM2+ motherboard.

ECS A78F2-TI

Its called the A78F2-TI and it’s the first for many things on the AMD platform. Its the first AMD socket F2+ board to support the upcoming Kaveri family of processors as well as the current Trinity and Richland APU families. Its also the first thin-ITX motherboard for the AMD platform.

Thin-ITX is a standard created by Intel that allows motherboard manufacturers to make boards to fit into all-in-one barebones PCs, allowing enthusiasts to build up their own all-in-one unit to their liking and at a fraction of the cost of an Apple iMac.

The board also employs DDR3-SODIMM slots also found on laptops, has mini PCI-E slots for a half-height wireless card and mSATA SSD, has dual HDMI and a single Displayport output and 2:1 channel audio, perfect for those tinny speakers that manufacturers bundle on all-in-one computers.

ECS KBN-I ITX

ECS Z87H3-AX Extreme

ECS Z87H3-AX Golden

The rest of their lineup was dedicated to new Intel Haswell and AMD Kabini motherboards. The ECS KBN-I (Ha, good one ECS) is the first consumer-bound Kabini platform, with the full system-on-chip design fitting into the ITX form factor. It supports up to 16GB of DDR3 memory and runs the A6-5200 APU which has four Jaguar cores running at 2.0GHz and GCN-based Radeon HD8400 graphics.

On the Haswell front, the Z87H3-AX Extreme is the first full-sized board ECS announced for the platform. It has a couple of overclocking-friendly features such as a port 80 debug LED to help diagnose system issues and can run triple SLI or Crossfire, as the first three PCI-Express slots conform to the 3.0 standard. Complementing that are six SATA 6GB/s ports, one mSATA port, eSATA, HDMI and, oddly enough, a Thunderbolt port.

The Z87H3-AX Golden is also called the “Gank Machine”, for reasons ECS didn’t explain. However it does look quite high-end – there are dual Gigabit network ports driven by Bigfoot and Realtek, a port 80 debug LED, some on-board buttons for powering on the board and resetting the BIOS and some voltage measuring points for overclockers. Both boards have a twelve-phase VRM capacitor bank to help deliver clean, stable power to the processor.

ECS has made no commitment to availability or pricing.