ECS KA3-MVP Extreme

We are currently reviewing this board. Our initial experience is that the chipset runs way cooler than the NF 590/570 SLI. The performance is also on par if not better than the 590SLI.

ECS KA3-MVP Extreme is the first ATi RD580 and the new ATi South bridge SB600 which replaces the ULi M1575. This board based on ATI Crossfire™ Xpress 3200 chipset that is the first unrestricted 2x16 PCI Express soluction. It supports extreme overclocking and unprecedented control over system behavior.

The KA3 MVP meets AMD’s Live® digital media platform requirements. AMD Live is a growing collaboration of music and cinema artists and producers using AMD solutions to create and distribute content. Supported by AMD Live, KA3 MVP provides the complete multimedia power to create and bring this digital media content to all rooms of a home.

ECS’ Scalable D.G.E. (Scalable Dual Graphic Engines) architecture means the KA3 MVP can fully leverage ATI’s CrossFire Xpress 3200 chipset technology. The ATI Crossfire Xpress 3200 architecture has optimized the number, configuration, and utilization of its PCI-Express lanes, allowing the full-bandwidth of 8 GB/s to GPUs to be realized. This architecture’s increased bandwidth and data flow has removed the bottleneck common to x16 solutions to this point. Scalable D.G.E. not only allows two graphics cards to work simultaneously at full-bandwidth to generate spectacular 3D graphics, it also enables support for simultaneous display on up to four devices and even improves support for single PCIe graphics cards.

At the heart of the KA3 MVP is the ATI Crossfire Xpress 3200 chip and its great ability to handle overclocking well. This includes overclocked FSB bus speeds of 1333 MHz, overclocked DDR2 memory of 1066 MHz and automatic PCI-E overclocking when ATI GFX cards are used.

Other KA3 MVP features include a Realtek ALC822 audio codec for 8-channel HD audio and a host of I/Os including 2 x SATAII, 4 x SATA, 8 x USB 2.0, Dual LAN (1 x Gb, 1 x 10/100), RAID support, 2 x S/PDIF (Optical and Coaxial) and optional 1394.

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