ECS KA3 MVP Motherboard

This ECS KA3MVP is an AM2 socket-based motherboard, based on the ATX form

factor. The board is meant for building compute and graphics intensive machines.

It supports ATi CrossFire technology to support two graphic cards for combined

graphic processing. Processors supported include an AMD Sempron, Athlon 64,

Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core/Athlon 64 FX processor. 

It has a FSB of 1 GHz, and there are 4 DIMM slots that support DDR2 800MHz

memory modules. Interestingly, it has 8 SATA II ports with two different

controllers, and supports RAID 0, 1 and 0+1 configurations. Besides this, it

also supports FireWire 400, 8-channel audio for audiophiles and 10 USB ports. It

even has dual LAN, one based on 10/100 Mbps Ethernet and the other 1 Gbps. It

also comes with good bundled software and utilities like Norton Antivirus, Live

Update, AutoOver Clocking, etc. Plus, it has the regular slew of two PCI, I PCIe

1x, and two regular IDE ports.

Price: Rs 7,000 (2 yr warranty)

Key Specs: CrossFire edition, AM2 socket, 800MHz DDR2 support

Contact: Cyberstar India, Bangalore Tel: 51266808 E-mail: ripunjay@cyberstarindia.com

Coming to performance, we used an AMD Athlon FX-62, 1 GB DDR2 400 MHz RAM,

and a SATA hard drive as our test bed. We tested it with an NVIDIA 7800GT, which

worked perfectly, despite it being an Ati board. We ran PCMark 2005, 3Dmark

2005, Business Winstone 2002 and Doom 3 tests on it, which test for overall

system performance, graphics, business productivity, and gaming performance

respectively. The board scored 6343 and 7946 in PCMark and 3Dmark tests

respectively, which were both good scores, and in fact better than some of the

other boards we've seen. Likewise, the score for Business Winstone was a 46.3,

indicating good business functionality, and an ample 90 fps in Doom3.

Bottom Line: Given the rich features set and good performance, the

board is a good buy for its price.