Bit-tech has gotten some more detailed pictures of ECS's upcoming X58B-A Black series motherboard, and it looks like it could be a viable alternative to Asus, Gigabyte and MSI, at least for those on a bit more restrictive budget, as ECS is generally cheaper than those three.

The X58B-A might not have all the latest features and it seems to be using a fairly paltry six-phase power regulation circuitry, so this one isn't for extreme overclockers. Nonetheless, it'll give you everything you need to get a Core i7/X58 system up and running and then some.

The board also has six memory slots, two PCIe x16 slots, one PCIe x4 slot, two PCIe x1 slots and a PCI slot. Again, nothing too exciting, but good enough for most users. There are also six SATA ports and some will be happy to see that ECS has dumped the floppy and IDE connectors. Oddly enough, there's still a header for a serial port on the board.

Around the back you'll find two PS/2 ports, six USB 2.0 ports, a FireWire port, dual Gigabit Ethernet, a pair of eSATA ports, 7.1-channel analog audio outputs with optical S/PDIF oput and a BIOS reset button. The board has headers for two more FireWire ports and four more USB 2.0 ports.

Finally, the board has a set of power and reset buttons and a debug LED display. The chipset and MOSFET's are cooled by a heatpipe setup, but again, it doesn't look as impressive as some we've seen. Overall, this looks like an okay board, but as we said, nothing out of the ordinary.

The good news is that ECS has priced the board at US$260 (€197/£157) which is the cheapest X58 board we've seen to date. This is good news for those wanting to jump on the Core i7 platform without spending a small fortune on a motherboard.

You can find a couple of pictures and some more details here