When it comes to motherboards, ECS probably isn't one of the first names that pop into your head. Instead it will be companies like ASUS, ASRock, GIGABYTE and MSI. Earlier in the year, though, we checked out the A75 based ECS A75F-A and it did a good job of impressing us and being a pretty nice all round board. Today, though, we take the time to check out something a lot higher end in the form of the Intel X79 based X79R-AX. We saw ECS do a pretty good job with the lower end A75 board; it will be interesting to see how they handle the new high end chipset from Intel along with our high end i7 3960X CPU. As always, we'll start by checking out the package to see what ECS are offering us before we move inside to see the bundle that's available. Once we've done that we'll move onto the board itself before we head into the BIOS, check out our testbed, talk about overclocking potential a bit and finally get into the performance side of things to see just what the ECS X79R-AX can do for us today with our i7 3960X CPU. That just about covers everything, so let's just get stuck into the package to see what's going on here today.