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ECS GANK MACHINE Z87H3-A2X EXTREME (Intel LGA 1150)

cadaveca

cadaveca

My name is Dave
Joined
Apr 10, 2006
Messages
17,241 (2.47/day)
Like a mad rush of level 60 rogues, the ECS GANK MACHINE launches its assault on the Intel Haswell platform in a way no other would even attempt, going straight for the kill. Built with gaming in mind, and a bit of overclocking, too, the ECS GANK MACHINE not only surprised me, but left me feeling helpless, and under-skilled.

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They need to step it up with the colour scheme here. An all black board would have been better.
 
cough boring at that, The board is a major step up from their boards in the past, I had a few ECS- good stock boards- better than Intels offering at the time. I want to see this in Skt 2011 and AM3+, FM2+
 
Crappy name, but good performance. I'm still waiting for that ASUS MAXIMUS VI GENE review... ;)
 
The name of this board alone deserves are 10.
 
.....been looking to try something different found some cases for cheap..... next its either this or giga. or maybe both
 
Am i the only one that seems to think the overclocking bench results were kind of a mixed bag?? They seem to be all over the place.

I love the inclusion of the Msata/Mini-Pcie slot though. Be nice to get some SSD caching going on.... but not that it matters now since Samsung have Rapid Mode on their 840 drives which caches data to any ram you may have spare and ram is almost infinitely faster. Anandtech did an article/review on Samsungs 840 Evo with Rapid mode and speeds hit 3.8Gbits

Imagine using rapid mode if you had 3100mhz ram!!
 
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They need to find an urban dictionary and find out what "gank" means.

Thanks for the review Dave!
 
erocker said:
They need to find an urban dictionary and find out what "gank" means.
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Buy 6 ECS motherboards, build 6 machines - Gank other nubs on F@H/WCG or bitcoin farms
 
erocker said:
They need to find an urban dictionary and find out what "gank" means.

Thanks for the review Dave!
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Gank means to attack with overwhelming power, by surprise.

Example:

"I thought I was ready to fight, but instead, I just got ganked by a horde of goblins"

FreedomEclipse said:
Am i the only one that seems to think the overclocking bench results were kind of a mixed bag?? They seem to be all over the place.
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They are, a bit, but there's nothing really out of place...the BIOS is tuned(timings and Turbo adjusted) for specific use, which leads to that behavior. It also doesn't use all cores @ the same multi where many boards in those results do, since I report "out-of-the-box" performance for stock. That's why I have that little paragraph about how I feel about boards enabling the same multi out of the box, and about Intel's Tuning Plan."

FreedomEclipse said:
Imagine using rapid mode if you had 3100mhz ram!!
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Hmm. Not sure how to take this, since I got that 3100 MHz Avexir kit....are you mailing me a Samsung SSD?:p
 
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cadaveca said:
Hmm. Not sure how to take this, since I got that 3100 MHz Avexir kit....are you mailing me a Samsung SSD?:p
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On the contrary - I thought you were gonna mail me the 3100mhz kit!! Ive had a few days to test Rapid Mode with my dads new build though Hes only got some LP Corsair Vengeance 1600mhz sticks. I do want a samsung 840 but my Plextor M5 Pro is less than 8 months old. I think Rapid Mode would benefit me quite a bit as I have BF3 & 4 installed on my ssd (boot) drive.

It also makes more sense because i have 16Gigs of Kingston Hyper X Beast - 8Gigs of which are probably doing nothing at all but its all about dat quad channel yo
 
erocker said:
They need to find an urban dictionary and find out what "gank" means.

Thanks for the review Dave!
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yeah, thats weird name
why dont they use something like "G-Level"
 
micropage7 said:
yeah, thats weird name
why dont they use something like "G-Level"
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Because it sounds shit? (I wanted to say cuz it sounded gay but that would be a tad immature)
 
micropage7 said:
yeah, thats weird name
why dont they use something like "G-Level"
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DRONE, GANK and DOMINATION are the board names in this series. I have the other two sitting here. Those names are very much gaming-oriented, where as G-level...or whatever, might not be as recognizable.
 
cadaveca said:
DRONE, GANK and DOMINATION are the board names in this series. I have the other two sitting here. Those names are very much gaming-oriented, where as G-level...or whatever, might not be as recognizable.
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yep, name could give some image about the hardware, like gaming, workstation, for oc, and like that
drone and domination sounds good
i hope ECS would give us better alternative board since ECS is old player
 
just out of linguistical interest. gank, does it come from gang-ed (i.e. overtaken by a gang)?
 
"GANK MACHINE" "L337 GAMING" ugh sounds like a COD player gave them a bunch of buzz words....
 
Nice review Dave...

Look up "Keibane Airport" ICAO name... then look up the definition in the urban dictionary:

The term gank has several meanings, but often implies an overwhelmingly large group or much higher leveled player killing you and/or your group. ("A 60 Hordie ganked me"" or "Alliance players are ganking lowbies") It frequently carries the implication the attack is overwhelming or otherwise clearly biased against the individual, either being substantial lower in level or having been previously weakened by an unrelated threat.

Successful ganks usually consist of very short fights and depend on tactics like high burst DPS and the ability to hide; Rogues are the prototypical ganker. Areas such as "Ganklethorn Vale" and Hillsbrad Foothills are infamous for ganking, as they are locations that naturally overlap differently-leveled characters of opposing factions.
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cokker said:
"GANK MACHINE" "L337 GAMING" ugh sounds like a COD player gave them a bunch of buzz words....
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Actually GANK is more of an mmorpg term... I played guildwars for 7years, i should know :p
 
getting off topic now from the previous post...

:p

well I was surprised that it perform good. I know ECS has done some boards but they are not really well known here in korea....

I was searching for z87 boards online earlier and this board has caught my attention..

I then immediately search and dave has a review. I started reading and I was amazed by the performance. It is not the best but it is not the worst. Some of the benchmarks, they are between 2nd to 4th.

One reason caught my attention is the PCI E allocation. At most new boards now, they have PCI E 1.0 as first slot (excluded boards with PLX and x79) and then PCI E 3.0. But this board has PCI 3.0 as first slot. I like it like this..... :peace:

anyway, i will keep an eye on their upcoming boards, :clap:
 
Nice review man!

I say the bios is easy on the eyes, and also love the bios back up feature!

What the hell is that big ass chip top right of the memory slots?
 
fullinfusion said:
Nice review man!

I say the bios is easy on the eyes, and also love the bios back up feature!

What the hell is that big ass chip top right of the memory slots?
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It's an ITE Super I/O chip. night.fox is reading the sticker on top, but that's not exactly what's under the sticker....ECS does that fairly regularly, putting the BIOS sticker on the SuperI/O chip..
 
night.fox said:
getting off topic now from the previous post...

:p

well I was surprised that it perform good. I know ECS has done some boards but they are not really well known here in korea....

I was searching for z87 boards online earlier and this board has caught my attention..

I then immediately search and dave has a review. I started reading and I was amazed by the performance. It is not the best but it is not the worst. Some of the benchmarks, they are between 2nd to 4th.

One reason caught my attention is the PCI E allocation. At most new boards now, they have PCI E 1.0 as first slot (excluded boards with PLX and x79) and then PCI E 3.0. But this board has PCI 3.0 as first slot. I like it like this..... :peace:

anyway, i will keep an eye on their upcoming boards, :clap:
Click to expand...

yep in here most people know ECS as just value board
although not on the top of the line so far ECS gives good performance and their price is good too
 
cadaveca said:
It's an ITE Super I/O chip. night.fox is reading the sticker on top, but that's not exactly what's under the sticker....ECS does that fairly regularly, putting the BIOS sticker on the SuperI/O chip..
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Bios chip? wth man?

I see two soldered chips on the lower board for the bios!

Weird but ok I trust ya :peace:
 
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