ECS Z97-Machine Review

Performance Analysis

There wasn't anything to really write home about in the benchmarks at stock speed. The numbers were pretty lowly across the board, with the Z97-Machine posting the slowest result in the Media Benchmarks and equal-slowest in the game tests too. There were no major issues in the storage tests and the M.2 port lived up to expectations as well.


A couple of points to get cheery about were the very low idle and load power consumption at stock speed - lower than many mini-ITX motherboards in fact, although when overclocked this increased to standard but still fairly competitive levels. Here, the benchmark numbers improved dramatically, but overall it was a little slower than the average results for a 4.8GHz overclock. Perhaps the biggest surprise was the onboard audio, which proved to be one of the best we've tested and was clearly more advanced than your average offering.

Conclusion

The ECS Z97-Machine is a very mixed bag. We have serious concerns over the EFI, which is poor compared to the competition and even updating it resulted in issues too. The lack of a built-in BIOS update tool really puts the board at a disadvantage compared to the four main manufacturers with even the majority of their super-budget boards offering this feature - ECS has a lot of catching up to do here, as it's noticeably behind. However, the EFI is usable and we did eventually hit our CPU's maximum clock speed, admittedly with some very toasty VRM heatsinks

Performance wasn't great in terms of speed both at stock and overclocked, although the onboard audio is actually fairly respectable, even if it lacks noise-isolated circuitry. However, there are a few other issues such as just four SATA ports plus minor aesthetic concerns. A lot will come down to your needs; if you're desperate for an M.2 port and don't intend to do much overclocking, then the Z97-Machine is worth considering, especially as it has a modicum of overclocking tools and multi-GPU support too - these are almost unheard of at this price so it deserves plenty of credit here. We'd certainly recommend leaving the BIOS alone update-wise, though, but if you're not fussed about multi-GPU or M.2, our personal preference for an entry-level Z97 motherboard would be ASRock's Z97 Pro 3. It not only has a much slicker, confident-feeling EFI and two additional SATA ports but is much more polished in the eyes of an enthusiast.