ECS KA3 MVP is the first board we received that is based on the ATi RD580+SB600 chipsets. With this new South bridge, it has upgraded its specification close to its nearest competitor nvidia. Supporting Dual PCIex16 for CrossFire and 4 SATAII ports with NCQ AHCI compliant (NV is 6 NCQ non AHCI), it is the top chipsets from ATi to harness the dual graphics capability using CrossFire abd new technologies.

In terms of features, the KA3 MVP supports the Socket AM2 Platform ATI Crossfire™ Xpress 3200 chipset that is the first unrestricted 2x16 PCI Express soluction.The board supports DDR2-800 and 6 ports of SATA II with RAID by SB600 and Jmicron controller on board. KA3 MVP also has GbE + Fast Ethernet supported out of the box. To add on, it has support for 1394 support and 8 ch HD audio.

With its scalable D.G.E PCI Express slots (Dual 16x slots), you can now run CrossFire on it for improved graphics performance or can use it for quad-display. The board also supports I.O.C, a dynamic overclocking technology which detects system load and instantly boosts frequency for overall performance. The board also supports eSATA allowing you to hook external SATA enclosures to the mainboard for data backup purposes. Top hat flash is supported. Just in case you misflash your BIOS, just fit the top hat flash on top of the existing BIOS and boot up. Remove the top hat flash and flash the correct BIOS to the onboard BIOS chip and you have recovered your dead BIOS.

Performance wise, we can see from the benchmarks, it is on par if not better when compared to the top notch ASUS M2N32-SLI based on the NV 590 SLI. The first thing we noticed is that the KA3 MVP has a slightly better memory bandwidth when compared to the M2N32 SLI. In other benchmarks, it wins by a few percentage or matches the scores of the NV 590 SLI board.

Overclocking features are there. You can change the voltage levels of the CPU, HT, NB etc. The CPU Freq has a wide range of 200 ~ 500MHz, and a multiplier of up to 10x (for our 4000+). As the CPU Vcore is limiting us to 1.4v at the max, we weren't able to go beyond our 2.4GHz (240x10) with HT multiplier set to 5x. That means hypertransport is running at 1.2GHz The voltage options should have a larger window. See Gallery for BIOS options.

Packaging and documentation are pretty well done for the KA3 MVP. I particularly like the Top Hat Flash bundled in the package.

Overall, this board is mean and fast. I presume the price won't definitely be affordable compared to a 590 SLI board which is selling at rocket high price. The only regret is vcore voltage level which is simply not enough.

Pricing (US)

Pricing (UK)

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Pros

• SATA II (NCQ)
• HD Audio
• 1394
• GbE
• eSATA
• Top Hat Flash

Cons

• PCI based Fast Ethernet
• No WiFi

Ratings

Here are my ratings out of 10.