ECS KA3 MVP Extreme

INTRODUCTION

When AMD launched the AM2 socket CPUs, NVIDIA was hot out of the starting blocks with their new nForce5 chipset. From ATI however there were not much sound and you could have been fooled that they weren’t planning to release anything. While investigating motherboards for the big Multi-GPU article we got wind of the new Xpress 3200 for AM2 and started to hunt for motherboards.

ECS was the only manufacturer which could supply us with a Xpress 3200 for AM2 motherboard, the KA3 MVP Extreme , which thus is the motherboard we are reviewing today at Bjorn3d. Can it hold its own against the multitude of nForce5 motherboards? Read on to find out.

Xpress 3200 AND SB600 FOR AM2

The Xpress3200 has 44 PCI-E lanes and allows you to have 16 lanes for each video card instead of 8. One thing ATI is often pointing out to us media is the fact that ATI has chosen to let both their 16x PCI-E slots connect to the RD580. NVIDIA on the other hand connects each of their 16X PCI-E slots to the MCP and the SPP. According to ATI the fact that the data then has to travel between the MCP and SPP to the CPU adds a bit of an overhead compared to ATI's solution. This is something you only would notice with slower cards and I must admit I haven’t seen much empirical evidence yet that this actually affects gaming performance.

With the Xpress 3200 for AM2 and even more importantly the new SB600 Southbridge ATI has finally added some missing features to the chipset-pair.

• Support for up to 10 USB 2.0 ports (up from 8 ports)
• SATA 2 support Including support for NCQ.  (Previous only SATA1 support)
• Support for 4-drive RAID 10 in addition to RAID 0 and RAID 1.
• HD-Audio (same as before)

THE FEATURES OF THE KA3-MVP

ECS advertises the KA3-MVP this way:

• The First Motherboard Supports AMD Socket AM2 Platform
• ATI Crossfire™ Xpress 3200 chipset that is the first unrestricted 2x16 PCI Express soluction
• Extreme overclocking and unprecedented control over system behavior
• Socket AM2 supports up to dual channel DDR2 800
• Supports SATA 3Gb/s and RAID 0,1,10 function
• Supports Dual LAN & IEEE1394 connection
• Supports high quality 8-CH Intel® High Definition Audio

I’m not sure I agree on the first point as I, from my own experience, could get hold of nForce5 motherboards far earlier than the KA3-MVP. The overclocking claim also is quite bold.

The KA3MVP Extreme is a good example on how motherboard makers solve the lack of features in the ATI chipset. Both on the SATA-front and on the LAN-front ECS has added some third-party solutions. Even so the motherboard only got a single Gigabit controller, something that probably won't bother that many people. I did actually have some issues installing the drivers for the Agere controller though so for this article I choose to use the Realtek controller.

Features worth mentioning are:

PCI slot with better filtering circuit
One of the PCI-slots have a better filtering circuit and is recommended to be used for audio cards.

Doctor LED
While it sounds like a German Porno-star it actually is two LED's that indicate if the PCI-E slots are working fine. They do so by blinking randomly with a clear blue color. Quite funky and irritating after a while.

Port multiplicator
The motherboard has a funky way of supporting up to 5 SATA disks on one SATA connector. With the motherboard you get a back-panel with a SATA port. This back-panel is hooked up to one of the JMB363 SATA ports. With an external port-multiplication device (has to be bought separately) you then can connect up to 5 drives to this one SATA-port.

Top-Hat Flash
I didn’t get this with my review motherboard but in retail boards you should get a second bios-chip which can be placed upon the old that sits on the motherboard. This allows you to start from a fresh bios which overwrites the corrupted one on the motherboard.