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:
| 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 |
You get a lot of stuff with this board! Four SATA cables, an ethernet cable (I’m up to my ears in ethernet cables, but am always happy to get another one!), a rear bracket for eSATA, a rear bracket for a parallel port if you need one, another bracket for extra USB and firewire ports, and a cool little tool for restoring your BIOS if you damage it while upgrading. You also have the manual and two install disks with drivers and extra software.
Other thoughts
Coloring…hmm… ECS chose the colors of the board & connectors with a purpose. I am sure they did – they would not have just thrown together whatever was lying around. Perhaps in one of their major markets the more bright, mismatched colors the better, and this is a real winner. But when I see it, I can’t help but remember the old giant LEGO sets that you find in preschools. There are, literally, like 12 different colors going on all on the same board. It’s just not appealing to my eyes. These things are subjective though, and in fairness, the PCB of the board itself is stunning! You may not be able to tell from the photos, but it is a very cool metallic-purple that reminds me of automotive paint. Very cool indeed!
The layout of the board is very good overall. There’s plenty of room around the CPU socket. If your video cards use larger heatsinks though, you can say goodbye to one of your PCI slots or the little ePCIx1 slot, or both, if you utilize the CrossFire function. Particularly welcome is the positioning of the legacy IDE/PATA connectors: there is one near the bottom of the board, and one near the top. This is perfect, because you usually have your optical drives installed near the top of your computer case, and the hard disks are usually down lower. This arrangement will help clutter issues, and also prevents the problem of IDE cables from being too short.
One glaring thought: I don’t like the look of those passively-cooled northbridge & southbridge heat sinks. Passively cooled heatsinks do not lend themselves to successful overclocking. The good news though is that they are not held on by two-sided thermal tape, but are attached to the board, and under continual pressure against the logic chips themselves. They have a little phase-change thermal interface material between the metal heat sink and the chip to help with heat transfer. I’m sure they’ll work fine at default speeds, but we’ll have to see how they do when we crank things up.
On the side of the board it is nice to see four USB ports available (the included installable bracket makes two more ports available as well as one IEEE 1394 a.k.a. firewire port), and both optical and coaxial S/PDIF audio out. The rest is pretty much standard fare, except for the interesting fluorescent cooling fan, which is supposed to help cool the power MOSFETs. It looks like it very well may, but it may also be eye-candy, either way, it certainly won’t hurt.
Hardware installation was a breeze, graphics cards, RAM, cables, CPU, etc., all fit well without cramping or other issues. Initial boot up and BIOS had some issues though. Here’s the hardware used to test the machine:
- AMD Athlon 64 3800+ socket AM2 – nominally runs at 2 GHz
- Ultra X-Finity 500W PSU
- ATI Radeon X1800XL PCI-E
- OCZ XTC DDR2 PC4200 DDR2-553MHz
- 2x SATA Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 160 GB – connected to ATI-based SATA
- 1x PATA Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 120 GB – connected to JMicron JMB363
- 1x PATA Samsung SpinPoint 7200 160GB – connected to JMicron JMB363
- Lite-On SHOW-1693S DVD-RW – connected to ATI-based PATA
- AGI generic 52X CD-ROM – connected to JMicron JMB363 SATA via adapter
- Foxconn 802.11g wireless card
Upon installing everything, I pressed the power button and nothing happened. I quickly turned off the switch on the back of the PSU to prevent any burnout or other horrible events. I checked multiple times to be sure all connections were secure, turned the PSU back on, hit the poser button again, but still nothing. I went through this about 4 or 5 times with zero success.
Then, when I had just about given up, I pushed the power button, and just sat back, and – I kid you not – after about two minutes of just sitting there doing nothing, the crazy thing starts to boot up like a computer possessed. Well, this is just not right. After a lot of testing, and swapping out drives from different SATA or PATA connectors, it turns out that it makes a huge difference what drive is connected where on the motherboard – I cannot explain why, nor does the manual.
Which brings me to the next point: the manual. It looks good, you can tell effort went into it, and for the hardware setup section it is spectacular! Every connector has the pin-out diagrams included, everything is well-labeled, and it is even written well. But once you get to the BIOS section it is woefully deficient.
BIOS options can be tricky for anybody. Different manufacturers have various ways of explaining functions and features, but usually you can make sense of the basics. For this board though, being labeled as “Extreme”, ECS includes all sorts of user-tweakable and performance features. A lot of these have bizarre and cryptic descriptions, with meaningless explanations. For example: in the memory settings area of the BIOS, you will find the item, “DQS Training Control (Perform DQS)”, and for the manual’s explanation: “DQS training is used to place the DQS strobe in the center of the data eye.” What?!? What’s the “data eye”? What does this mean? Try Google-ing “DQS Training Control”, and you will get back a tiny number of hits, none of which explain what DQS is.
Same thing goes for another item, “Memclock tri-stating”. And the manual’s explanation: “This item enables or disables memclock tri-stating function.” Ah, yes, but what IS the mysterious memclock tri-stating function? Another Google search merely showed me that other people were as clueless as I. I ended up simply disabling both options…who knows whether that’s good or bad… But ECS should not leave us hanging like this. If you’re gonna put in these options, at least tell what they do.
My next biggest concern was the complete lack of documentation or instruction in the manual for setting up any of the RAID functions that come on the motherboard, and for not including the RAID drivers on a floppy disk for Windows installation. The only documentation is for a program called “ATI WebPAM”, which lets you configure RAID once you’re in Windows. Well, that only helps if you’ve already successful loaded Windows, and doesn’t do anything for you if you want to install Windows on a RAID array. The only reason I could even set up RAID on this board is because I have set up dozens of RAID systems before, and I know what to look for and how to do the procedure. This lack of information is only going to frustrate end-users, and will contribute to a poor reputation in the community.
The KA3-MVP Extreme uses the Award Bios, and has the usual overclocking settings. The CPU Voltage can be modified from +0.55V to +0.7625V in 0.0125V steps and from +0.775V to +1.350V in 0.25V steps. Memory voltage can be modified +0.05V to +0.35V in 0.05V steps. North Bridge Voltage can be set from normal, +0.05V +0.10V and 0.15V. HyperTransport Voltage can be set as normal, +0.05V, +0.10V and +0.15V. The CPU FSB can be set from 200MHz-500MHz in 1MHz increments.
Let me tell you about what does work well in the BIOS now. Overclocking. This is where I think the name “Extreme” comes into play. Now it’s amazing that we can overclock on ECS boards at all, considering that for years and years they supported nothing but stock speeds (officially).
But now we have settings to alter the CPU multiplier (if unlocked), FSB speeds in 1MHz increments from 200 – 500, we can add voltage to the CPU, the memory, and even the chipset itself. This is great, but it would be better if ECS allowed greater voltage options: you max out at 1.4v on the CPU, and you can add only .35v to the memory. Even so, we were able to overclock the little Athlon 64 by 700 MHz!
With just a little more juice, it would likely have gone even further. At 2.7 GHz though, Windows XP was perfectly stable, well enough to run the Prime95 CPU torture test for 48 hours without error. And remember the passively cooled heat sinks? They didn’t get all that hot. Well done here, ECS.
Another notable area is the on-board sound. It is fantastic! I have been impressed with the Realtek ALC-883 codec before, and it sounds just as wonderful on the ECS board. If you have a PCI card that you would prefer to use for sound though, the bottom PCI slot is a high-filtered slot to offer excellent I/O quality on your sound card.
The ECS-KA3-MVP Extreme is a good motherboard with several excellent attributes, but it has some rough spots. The funky BIOS quirks need to be fixed. Once you’re in Windows, the board is fine but it shouldn’t take three minutes to get there. The manual needs to explain things better, and include RAID settings. Third, the BIOS should be more generous with the voltage settings for both CPU and RAM.
Despite these minor issues, it does perform well in acutal use, and has no problems keeping up with nForce5 motherboards. There were no stability problems at all during the review period. At ~$140 this motherboard is a lot cheaper than other similarly featured motherboards (Foxconn C51XEM2AA and Asus M2N32 SLI Deluxe)… and it can run two ATI cards in Crossfire mode.
If ECS can get those things fixed, this will be a much more inviting product for novices, and people who want to just plug-and-play, and I would have no problem recommending it as the very best ATI/AMD solution for socket AM2. I’ve really enjoyed working with this board. It is the most fun I’ve ever had with an ECS product. If you consider yourself an expert or an adventurous person, and you want an AMD solution, you’ll find a lot to like about the KA3 MVP.
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