ECS Announces High-End Z97 Gaming Motherboard

ECS has announced its high-end Z97 motherboard – the Z97-MACHINE. This motherboard is part of the company's L337 Gaming lineup of products.

The motherboard, as mentioned, carries the Z97 chipset, thus having support for both the Haswell and the Haswell refresh CPUs from Intel. The CPU is fed power through a six-phase Digital VRM circuit, which draws its power from a single 8-pin EPS power connector. Wired to the LGA1150 socket are four DDR3 DIMM slots.

Also present are two PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slots along with three PCI-Express 1x slots. The motherboard also has a single M.2 slot, which will allow for some very, very speedy SSDs to be installed in the near future. SATA connectivity is present with four SATA3 (6 Gb/s) plugs.

ECS has equipped the board with Sound Blaster Cinema 2 audio circuitry, which it has wired to an ESS Sable Premier DAC. This means that audio quality will likely be good.

No word on pricing or availability yet, though this board is likely to be more readily available in the greater China region rather than the U.S.

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