ECS' Z97I-Drone Aims For Sub-$100 Price Point
ECS has built a budget-oriented Z97 Mini-ITX board for gamers.
At a live event in Silicon Valley, ECS showed off its Z97I-Drone motherboard, which is part of the company’s L337 gaming lineup. This is a Mini-ITX motherboard with the Z97 chipset, aimed at budget-oriented gamers.
The board has an LGA1150 socket, which is powered by a 5-phase VRM circuit. Wired to this socket are two DDR3 memory slots for dual-channel memory and a single PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slot. Storage connectivity is handled by five SATA3 (6Gb/s) ports. There is an M.2 slot present, although it may only support WiFi and Bluetooth adapters. There's also a single USB 3.0 header, a single USB 2.0 header, the audio headers, two 4-pin fan headers and the front-panel connectors.
Images Courtesy of ThinkComputers
Looking at this motherboard brings only one thought to mind: What was ECS thinking when it came up with the layout? The CPU socket is so close to the DDR3 memory slots and the PCI-Express connector that you’re bound to run into compatibility problems with most air coolers, and what’s the point of a budget-oriented motherboard if you’re essentially forced to consider water cooling to get decent performance out of it? Any air coolers that are compatible with the board design likely won’t give you enough cooling power. The placement of the SATA ports, USB headers, and the 8-pin EPS power connector is also annoying at best.
Pricing is expected to sit at about $100, which isn’t bad for a Mini-ITX Z97 board, but unless the layout really doesn’t bother you, you are probably better off looking elsewhere. The ECS Z97I-Drone is expected to hit shelves in September.
Follow Niels Broekhuijsen @NBroekhuijsen. Follow us @tomshardware, on Facebook and on Google+.

in terms of features, the board looks very good. the price is also very good. but looking at price and specs alone would be misleading in this motherboard's case, due to how the components are laid out on the mobo. i think that the socket placement might result in incompatibility (conflict with ddr3 dimms and discreet gfx cards) with a lot of down-draft and low profile coolers as well (e.g. cm gemini) as tower coolers. water cooling or all-in-one lcs is the way to go in this case. nowadays, cheap aio lcs from cooler master, antec and corsair go for around 60 bucks so builders won't be missing much.
i think ecs changed the vrm heatsink from the computex display sample:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/8136/computex-2014-ecs-z97idrone-miniitx-motherboard-and-uhd4k60-aio
They should have stuck to a more conventional layout.
I actually prefer the ATX connector on that side instead of in front of the memory in cases like the SG05 by SilverStone since it is less disruptive to case air flow.
This older gigabyte board fit just right with some slight heatsink mods.
http://i62.tinypic.com/2u40ahl.jpg
This is not to say I would not want t he LGA a bit further from the pci-e slot. I am just saying it is manageable.
Video card fit and all.
http://i59.tinypic.com/wloqzd.jpg
As someone who isn't in that demographic, I do agree that it sucks and is stupid, but as a person who has picked parts and built for a couple of friends, I understand priorities when it comes to a small budget.
As someone who isn't in that demographic, I do agree that it sucks and is stupid, but as a person who has picked parts and built for a couple of friends, I understand priorities when it comes to a small budget.
Given how close the cpu socket is to the pci-e slot i doubt you could use a hyper 212 evo if you're installing a graphics card.