Product Listing

ECS KA3 MVP (CrossFire Xpress 3200 - Socket AM2)

By Zachary Chan - 18 Jun 2006

Test Setup

Test Setup

ATI's CrossFire Xpress 3200 and SB600 chipset combo is launched at a time where it will directly compete at the enthusiast Socket AM2 level with NVIDIA's brand new nForce 590 SLI. As such, we'll see how the ECS KA3 MVP fares in comparison with an equally set up Foxconn C51XEM2AA motherboard. As usual, our test bed setup is listed below and benchmarking is run with a clean install on each board.

  • AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ (2.6GHz, Socket AM2)
  • 2 x 1GB Kingston HyperX DDR2-800 @ 12-4-4 CAS 4 CMD 1T
  • 2 x 1GB Kingston HyperX DDR2-800 @ 12-4-4 CAS 5 CMD 2T (ECS KA3 MVP only)
  • Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 80GB SATA hard disk drive (one single NTFS partition)
  • MSI GeForce 7900 GT 256MB - with NVIDIA ForceWare 91.28 beta driver
  • ATI SMBUS and AHCI driver (for ECS KA3 MVP only)
  • NVIDIA nForce 500 package 9.34 beta (Foxconn C51XEM2AA only)
  • Microsoft Windows XP Professional, Service Pack 2 - with DirectX 9.0c


Additional Notes

Although the KA3 MVP comes with a pretty detailed BIOS, ECS dropped the ball in regards to memory support. Once again, we find that there isn't any CAS timing options and the board reverts to SPD by default. The board is also unable to run at CMD 1T on DDR2-800 memory speeds (works fine on DDR2-667), so our benchmarks will have to be run with more relaxed memory timings. Like the older generation ECS Extreme motherboards (PF5 and PF22 come to mind), expect to see a dip in general performance because of this.


Benchmarks

The following set of benchmarks are used in this review:-

  • BAPco SYSmark 2004
  • Futuremark PCMark05
  • SPECviewperf 8.01
  • Futuremark 3DMark05
  • AquaMark3
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