ECS Elitegroup KA3MVP Extreme AM2 Motherboard

Elite Computer Systems, or ECS, has a huge presence in the motherboard market place. They have been around for 20 years now, have had most of their business in the OEM sector, but in the past few years have begun making a name for themselves in the DIY community.

Occasionally, their name has been a bit blemished though, with a somewhat undeserved reputation for making overly cheap products. In actuality, most of their products are still geared towards large OEM companies for end users that never even see the ECS brand; therefore their products require a very high amount of quality control and reliability — big companies wouldn’t put their faith in ECS if they made “cheap”, shabby products.

For this reason, though, ECS has not had quite the experience with making a product directly for end users like you and me, so in the past, some of their motherboards have not been too “end-user-friendly”. ECS is making a great effort to change this though. They want to be known, and they want to be known for making a great, fun, quality product. Let’s see how they managed with the CrossFire Xpress 3200.

The Xpress3200 has 44 PCI-E lanes, allowing 16 lanes for each video card (instead of 8). One thing ATI is often pointing out 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. The fact that the data then has to travel between the MCP and SPP to the CPU adds a bit of overhead compared to ATI’s solution. This is something you only would notice with slower cards, but we’ve never really seen any difference between them.

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

ATI is now owned by AMD, and the CrossFire Xpress 3200 is based on what was once the chipset known as RD580, but is now the AMD 580X — same thing, new marketing spin. CrossFire Xpress 3200 is AMD/ATI’s highest performance motherboard solution to date, with specifications on-par with pretty much anything Nvidia or Intel has to offer. In fact, there is a CrossFire Xpress 3200 solution for both AMD processors and Intel processors. Here are the specifications from ECS:

	ECS Elitegroup KA3 MVP Motherboard Specifications CPU Socket AM2 with AMD Athlon 64 FX/ Athlon 64/ Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core/ Sempron processor Support for 64-bit extended operating systems Support transfer rate of 2000/1600/1200/800/400 mega-transfers per second. Highly overclockable and robust Hypertransport interface Chipset AMD 580X Crossfire™ North Bridge: AMD 580X Crossfire South Bridge: AMD® SB600 Memory Support Dual-channel DDR2 memory architecture 4 x 240-pin DDR2 DIMM socket support up to 32GB Support DDR2 800/667/533/400 DDR2 SDRAM Expansion Slots 2 x PCI Express x16 slots 1 x PCI Express x1 slot 2 x PCI slots Storage Supported by SB600 2 x Ultra DMA133/100/66/33 device 4 x Serial ATA2 devices RAID0, RAID1, RAID10 configuration Supported by JMB363 2 x Ultra DMA133/100/66 devices 2 x Serial ATA2 devices RAID0, RAID1& RAID 0+1 configuration Support NCQ&eSATA & Hot plug&Port Multiplier Audio Realtek ALC883 8-channel audio CODEC IEEE 1394a VIA® VT6308P support 2 x IEEE1394a ports Dual LAN Agere E1310I Gigabit LAN controller Realtek 8100C 10/100 Mbps Fast Ethernet controller Rear Panel I/O 1 x PS/2 keyboard & PS/2 mouse connectors 4 x USB ports 2 x RJ45 LAN connectors 1 x Serial port (COM1) 1 x Audio port (Line-in,4x Line-out, Mic_in) 2 x Digital SPDIF (Optical & Coaxial) out Internal I/O Connectors 1 x 24-pin ATX Power Supply connector 1 x 4-pin ATX 12V connector 1 x Auxiliary 4-pin +12V connector 2 x IDE connectors 1 x FDD connector 6 x Serial ATA connectors 1 x Speaker header 1 x IrDA for SIR header 2 x 1394a headers 3 x USB 2.0 headers support additional 6 USB ports 1 x Front panel switch/LED header 1 x Front panel audio header CD in header 1 x 26-pin LPT header CPU / Chassis FAN headers 1x CPUFAN/1x SYSFAN/3x CASFAN connectors System BIOS Award BIOS with 4Mb Flash ROM Supports Plug and Play 1.0A, APM 1.2, Multi Boot, DMI Supports ACPI revision 1.0 specification Form Factor ATX Size 305mm*244mm