Product Listing

ECS KA1 MVP (ATI Radeon Xpress 200 CrossFire)

By Zachary Chan - 23 Mar 2006

Test Setup

Test Setup

We now come to the time where we take the KA1 MVP for a spin in our benchmarking lab. We've recently reviewed MSI's RD480 Neo2 motherboard based on the Radeon Xpress 200 CrossFire chipset and we will be comparing the enthusiast KA1 MVP against the mainstream RD480 Neo2. ATI's reference RD480 motherboard will also be used as a baseline.

The testbed setup for each motherboard are listed below. Besides the driver differences, you might have noticed that both the ECS and MSI boards are running on Corsair memory, while the reference board uses Kingston. This is due to a compatibility issue on the reference motherboard with our pair of Corsair DIMMs, so we swapped in a set of Kingston memory to complete the benchmarking.

  • ECS KA1 MVP
  • AMD Athlon 64 3500+ (2.2GHz)
  • 2 x 512MB Corsair DDR400 @ 6-3-3 CAS 2.5 CMD 1T
  • Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 80GB SATA hard disk drive (one single NTFS partition)
  • Gigabyte GV-NX66T128D-3 GeForce 6600GT 128MB - with NVIDIA ForceWare 81.98 driver
  • ATI Catalyst Southbridge drivers 6.2
  • Microsoft Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 1 (with DirectX 9.0c)

 

  • MSI RD480 Neo2
  • AMD Athlon 64 3500+ (2.2GHz)
  • 2 x 512MB Corsair DDR400 @ 6-3-3 CAS 2.5 CMD 1T
  • Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 80GB SATA hard disk drive (one single NTFS partition)
  • Gigabyte GV-NX66T128D-3 GeForce 6600GT 128MB - with NVIDIA ForceWare 81.98 driver
  • ULi SATA/RAID driver 6.2.07
  • Microsoft Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 1 (with DirectX 9.0c)

 

  • ATI Reference Radeon Xpress 200 CrossFire motherboard
  • AMD Athlon 64 3500+ (2.2GHz)
  • 2 x 512MB Kingston DDR400 @ 6-3-3 CAS 2.5 CMD 1T
  • Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 80GB SATA hard disk drive (one single NTFS partition)
  • Gigabyte GV-NX66T128D-3 GeForce 6600GT 128MB - with NVIDIA ForceWare 81.98 driver
  • ATI Catalyst Southbridge drivers 6.2
  • Microsoft Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 1 (with DirectX 9.0c)


Benchmarks

The following benchmarks will be used in this review:-

  • BAPco SYSmark 2004
  • Futuremark PCMark04
  • SPECviewperf 8.01
  • Futuremark 3DMark03
  • Futuremark 3DMark05
  • AquaMark3
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