As always we start off with a box photo so you know what to look for in the stores. Nice design, fits the dark/black theme.

Included in the package you'll receive the basics needed to get started. One lovely motherboard, four SATA cables, an eSATA cable, manual and driver CD, IO backplate and optionally you can purchase this motherboard with USB 3.0 and SATA6G controllers in the form of an add-on solution. We'll look at them more closely in a second.

Meet the latest offering from ECS, the H57H-MUS (V1.0A). Based on the recently very popular mATX design it is stuffed and loaded with features. The PCB design is done well, it's a nice layout and seems to be a good improvement in build quality over previous ECS motherboards. ECS ditched the open chokes and moved to solid core chokes, we also spot solid capacitors, proper buttons... it all looks and feels like a really nice improvement. But let's go into a little more detail. We'll start off with the add-on cards.

Let's quickly start off with the add-on cards received in the bundle. This is a SATA 6G card. It will utilize a PCIe x1 slot. Quite honestly it's not a charming solution at all. the H57 has 16 PCIe lanes available, insert this card and your graphics card will immediately jump into 8 lanes mode (over the 16 high-end needs). It's an alternative though. The add-on card has two SATA ports, one internal and one external eSATA. Here I again would have designed a card with two internal ports.