Blogs ECS P55H-AK Overclocking

http://www.bit-tech.net/blog/2010/09/26/tales-of-ecs-p55h-ak-overclocking/

 

Hopefully this is a step in the direction of making ECS a brand worth buying, good for them.

 

im sure on there web site they over clock an i5 to 5ghz on air.... seemed a bit far fetched to me...

 

"fter tearing our hair out for a few days, we went down to ECS' HQ, where the folks there had setup another P55H-AK for us to look at."

What a joke. you tested an independent board in your own office and it reached a pathetic 160 base clock. Then you go to their office where they have a hand picked board for you and it couldnt even reach 200 with a cherry picked sample!!!

This review is far too positive for a board thats supposedly high end. Crap bios, crap overclocking performance + high price.. yeah.. great..

 

Firstly, it's not a review, it's a blog about our experiences specifically because we couldn't put together a full review.

While I understand your extreme cynicism, I'll happily fill out the rest of the story to explain it just isn't as you allude .

It was after about 20 emails back and forth that I suggested I'd drop by to have a face to face chat about it. ECS weren't there to woo and demonstrate to me how awesome they really were, it was a session with 3 FAEs to test, take notes and debug their hardware with mine vs theirs and my overclocking techniques vs their own. It would have been a complete waste of everyone's time to work on a board that wasn't representative of what people buy. Essentially ECS got a free FAE (me) for an afternoon and got to know what hardware I tested with = value for them. That hardware will change by the time I test another ECS board though

FAEs simply aren't marketing people - they are paid to get stuff to work and frankly, ECS simply isn't that, uhh, 'cunning'. Lovely people buy don't really get the OC scene still.

The fact our own hardware used on their board got better than what they setup for us to test only reinforces this fact. Our point about the BIOS issues remains though and ECS know this - took notes and if they decide to update it it's up to them. We certainly don't recommend the P55H-AK and we can't say for certain whether the issue we had was isolated or not, but we appreciate it can overclock.

And anyway, if we're talking cherry picking, think about any review on the net that gets sent stuff from manufacturers. It just doesn't really happen - the editorial-manufacturer relationship is more important to companies than trying to con a single review with special hardware. Special BIOS' (which is why we download the latest from the manuf. website and reflash it) or special hardware would be too obvious and too time consuming given the extremely tight schedules the computing industry has to deal with.

@Infiniti - it was with a K-series, so they just ramped up the multiplier. THAT is a cherry picked CPU as part of a video advertorial ECS produced. K-series requires little from the motherboard apart from reliable power - there's no base clock adjustment so everything else stays within tolerances. You just crank the voltage and whack on a massive heatsink. Job done.