ECS makes a budget-oriented Z97 board for the Pentium Anniversary Edition CPU.
At Computex 2014, Intel unveiled its Pentium Anniversary Edition CPU, which was an unlocked Pentium processor for the LGA1150 socket. Given that it is a Pentium CPU, it is also quite inexpensive, but what point would there be to having a cheap overclockable CPU if you still need an expensive Z87 or Z97 motherboard? ASRock came out with its budget-oriented Z-series motherboards to meet that need, and now ECS is following in its footsteps with the Z97-PK.
The Z97-PK is a Z97 motherboard built to be as inexpensive as possible. The Micro-ATX board features two PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slots, four DDR3 memory slots for dual-channel memory, and four SATA3 (6 Gb/s) ports. You won't find any bells or whistles on this board – its sole purpose is to let you overclock the Pentium Anniversary Edition processor as cheaply as possible.
We're not sure how well this overclocking will go, though. The VRM circuitry consists of just two phases, and these aren't cooled. There is also just a single 4-pin EPS power connector, as opposed to the single 8-pin connector we find on most boards. Despite that, ECS claims that this motherboard can overclock the Pentium Anniversary Edition processor to a respectable 4.7 GHz using the One Key OC feature. If this is true, and if the price is right, this might just be an adequate motherboard for most budget gaming builds.
Rear I/O is also unremarkable, consisting of four USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0 ports, a single PS/2 connector, DVI, VGA, HDMI, Gigabit Ethernet, and multi-channel HD audio.
ECS hasn't provided info on pricing or availability, although we hope that this one will cost even less that ASRock's solutions.
Only two power phases? No thanks. Whole point of the overclock able Pentium to me is to buy it, and then later upgrade to a faster CPU (i5/i7). If the motherboard can't handle a faster CPU, then it seems rather pointless to me.
