ECS KA3 MVP Extreme

Testing Methods:

With the exception of SiSoft Sandra, all of our benchmarks have been engineered to give you numbers that you are likely to find useful when actually using the products we have evaluated in the real world.

We are also focusing a lot more of our time on evaluating the stability of the motherboards (and platforms) using a stress test designed to highlight any of the potential weaknesses that the product may have. That involves a gradually increasing amount of stress starting with Prime95 and expanding to IOMeter and an endless loop of Far Cry loop if all is well. This is to ensure that all parts of the system are stressed simultaneously over a period of time.

We believe that the consumer is never likely to subject their platform to this level of stress and we are not expecting every product to complete an entire extended stress test. However, most poorly engineered products fail within the first couple of hours, or even minutes, allowing us to make a conscious decision on whether a motherboard (or platform) is worth your money, regardless of how well it performs in our benchmarks.

Test Setup:

AMD Athlon 64 FX-62 (operating at 2800MHz - 14x200); 2 x 1GB Corsair XMS2-6400C3 (running at DDR2-800 in dual channel with 3.0-4-3-9-1T timings - 5.0-4-3-9-2T for the KA3 MVP); BFG Tech GeForce 7900 GTX OC video card (operating at 670/1640MHz); Seagate 7200.9 200GB 7,200RPM SATA 3Gbps hard disk drive; OCZ GameXStream 700W power supply unit; Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2; DirectX 9.0c; NVIDIA Forceware 91.31 WHQL.

Motherboards:

• ECS KA3 MVP (CrossFire Xpress 3200);
  
• ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe WiFi Edition (nForce 590 SLI);
  
• Foxconn C51XEM2AA (nForce 590 SLI).

CrossFire & SLI Testing:

Along with the single card testing, we ran our full suite of benchmarks on the three boards tested with multi-GPU enabled. This meant running Radeon X1900 CrossFire in CrossFire Xpress 3200 motherboards, and BFG Tech GeForce 7900 GTX OC SLI in nForce 500-series motherboards.

Test Notes:

Due to the lack of CAS Latency and Command Rate adjustments on the ECS KA3 MVP, we had to resort to running our Corsair XMS2-5400C3 modules at 5.0-4-3-9-2T. There is no doubting that this has reduced the potential performance achievable on the KA3 MVP. We have seen reviews with BIOS' featuring CAS Latency adjustments, but the latest-available BIOS on the ECS homepage doesn't have that option available.