ECS X79R-AX motherboard up for grabs

Posted on February 14th, 2012. Written by Rico.

For those who love building their own PCs, here’s a contest for you: ECS Philippines is raffling off a X79R-AX motherboard from Valentine’s up to the 26th.

The only requirement: visiting the contest app on Facebook and registering yourself. Complete specific tasks, and you’ll gain additional raffle entries. Liking the ECS Philippines Facebook page for example credits 10 entries to your account.

Is the ECS X79R-AX a good buy? It’s a bit pricey, but with good reason says Tom’s Hardware:

Honors for the best on-board features go to ECS’ X79R-AX, with its four-way graphics card support (matching Gigabyte), Bluetooth module (matching Asus), and integrated Wi-Fi adapter (trumping both). If we buy it from a vendor we trust, the X79R-AX’s $310 Web price is actually cheaper than what we pay for Asus’ P9X79 Pro

That’s right: this motherboard not only supports USB 3.0. It also has Bluetooth and WiFi built-in, saving the buyer from the trouble of buying adapters to complete their PC build. It also supports up to four different video cards through its array of PCI Express x16 slots—but using four cards covers up the internal USB 3.0 port.

Motherboards like the ECS X79R-AX are perhaps the important part of any PC. They are large printed circuit boards with expansion slots, sockets, and plugs for other kinds of computer hardware to connect to. If the processor is a computer’s brain, the motherboard is its nervous system, allowing everything inside your desktop or laptop to exchange and process information.

A good motherboard ensures that the computer’s parts are maximized, and is literally the foundation of any PC build. It makes no sense to buy expensive high-end memory for instance, when your motherboard doesn’t support its speed. Motherboards are also designed for specific processor types; the ECS X79R-AX is built to work with only Intel Socket 2011 (Sandy Bridge-E) CPUs.