We've seen a lot of board makers unveiling X58 motherboards lately, yet the list adds new members every day it seems. This time we're talking ECS and their X58B-A Black Edition. According to the maker, the Black Edition series includes products of a higher quality than what the company has recently released. The products are rather targeting the value conscious “middle-high level” of the market. The X58B-A Black Edition motherboard is priced at $260, which makes it a good and affordable upgrade solution.

The design of the board is a simple one. It features a six phase power regulation as well as one phase for north bridge and another for all six memory slots. The maker states that the board is able to support DDR3-1600 XMP. The X58B-A Black Edition includes the solid aluminum capacitors and environmentally sealed chokes, yet it uses rather old MOSFETs and the company didn't mention anything about a fancy power regulation like other makers use.

The ECS board features two Realtek Gigabit Ethernet chipsets which come with the usual teaming function, and also has a Realtek ALC888S High-Definition sound. It includes a JMicron JMB362 chipset to offer a couple of eSATA ports, yet only the base level six SATA are included. The rear I/O features reset buttons and clear CMOS button and there are also two-digit POST LED readout, a pair of PCI-Express 2.0 x16 slots, one x4 slot, two x1 slots and one PCI. The board features both SLI and CrossFire multi-GPU support as well.

The ECS X58B-A Black Edition motherboard tries to keep it all simple, and it may appeal this way to those looking for an uncomplicated upgrade. It comes with QoolTech II, which should keep it at a nice low temperature and also keep the noise down. The six phase power regulation conforms to Intel’s latest VRD 11.1 spec, and this is good news as well. The board does not offer a ton of overclocking features, yet it comes at a great price for what it offers and, as the X58 motherboards are expected to be anything but cheap, the card will appeal to users for sure, although the enthusiasts will have other options.